Since re-purposing my old DirecTV satellite installation into a free-to-air Ku satellite system, one of the first things I purchased was a PCIe card/DVB-S2 tuner (specifically the TBS 6902) which accepts a coax input from the LNB attached to my 39" satellite dish. Before attempting to capture signals, however, you have to make sure your dish is correctly aligned. For that, I splurged and purchased a digital satellite finder so I could ensure a proper lock on the satellite. If you don't have a strong lock, you're not going to be happy with the end-result of your capture.
On Windows there are a few software options for ingesting DVB-S2 transmissions. Personally, I use EBSpro 18.0.0.4 which is now freeware. (Note: as far as I can tell, the official site hosting this software no longer exists, so not only is it no longer maintained, you can only find it from unofficial sources, and for that reason, I will not be sharing a download link). If you have a tuner card (and its drivers) installed, EBSpro should detect it automatically.
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| My TBS 6902 shown in EBSpro |
From there, you have a few options. You can opt for a blindscan which will scan through a custom range of frequencies and symbol rates, though I've found my particular card does not work well with EBSpro for blindscanning. Or, if you know the frequency, symbol rate, and polarity to which you want to tune, you can navigate to "Tools>Signal Analyzer>DT Mode" to enter the data manually. In this case, because my dish is pointed at the Galaxy 19 satellite at 97°W, I'll choose the mux at 12185 H 22500.
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| Signal Analyzer |
After clicking "Lock Transponder", if your dish is correctly aligned, you should see a list of channels under "TSA (OK)".
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| List of PIDs |
Now you have a few options for capturing. You can opt to capture the mux (and all its PIDs) in its entirety (which would be quite a bit of data), or you can capture an individual channel. If you opt for capturing the entire mux, you'll be left with a .ts file with several programs. In VLC, you can choose between the programs by right clicking in the video view, then navigating to "Playback>Program". If you're just capturing a single channel, simply right click on the channel you wish to capture, then select "TS Grabber" and click "Record". This will create a transport stream media file for playback and, provided the channel does not have encryption flags enabled, will be compatible with the vast majority of media players/media servers (such as Plex).
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| This is where you can select which elements of the TS you'd like to capture. Some channels have many redundant audio tracks that you may not wish to capture, so this is where you'd de-select them |
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