The reality of streaming HD

Streaming a live broadcast will, however, tie up one of your Media PC’s TV tuners, preventing it from doing anything else. Since most Media PCs have two TV tuners, this would mean only one was available for recording a different channel. If both tuners were occupied streaming live content to two Extenders, then recording anything would be impossible.

Next the network. A 100Mbit Ethernet network may only deliver around 60Mbits/sec, in practice, once various overheads have been taken into consideration. The bit rate of high-definition content can vary enormously, with highly compressed bitstreams coming in at less than 10Mbits/sec, but higher-end content could exceed 40Mbits/sec. In terms of Freesat HD, it depends on the broadcaster (and often even the show) in question, but early BBC material has typically used above average bit rates.

So it all depends on the content in question, but we’d say unless you’re dealing with very high bit rate streams, you should be able to support the desired two with your 100Mbit network. As a side note, upgrading to Gigabit networking may not suffice, as none of the Extenders currently supports wired networks over 100Mbit.

HD streaming reality check
A Media Center PC equipped with HD tuners and one or more Version 2 Extenders should in theory do what you’re after. Indeed if you were based in the US and dealing with US HD broadcasts, I’m confident it would work in practice too, but UK-based enthusiasts have a number of additional hurdles to overcome.

Falling at the first gate is Media Center itself, which at the time of writing didn’t officially support satellite TV tuner cards. An earlier workaround was to use a special driver that made them appear to the operating system as terrestrial tuner cards, but the ‘Fiji’ update to Vista Media Center, which will hopefully be available by the time you read this, should provide official support for DVB-S satellite tuners.

What’s less certain, though is its support for high-definition satellite broadcasts in the UK. HD works in the US with Media Center because they broadcast in the older Mpeg2 format, which Media Center has always been able to understand. In the UK though, high-definition broadcasts are using the newer H.264 format, which isn’t supported properly within Media Center ­ not yet anyway.