I’ve blogged about getting windows media center to work in new zealand using an aerial, dvb-t. of course as soon as i got it to work properly we moved house again and this time there isn't any coverage using an aerial. instead the house does have a satellite dish, so i set about trying to get media center to work with a dvb-s decoder.

i bought an AVerMedia AVer3D Satellite TV Tuner, I have to largely because I could buy it over here. It seems to work fine, I have to say that reception using a satellite dish is a lot better than using an aerial even in a good reception area.

Of course the setup needed some magic numbers to get it right. The first task was to setup the tuner in Media Center. When you are setting up the TV source in Media Center select Satellite as the signal type, select No for More Than One Tuner. Then you need to select Opus D1 NZ as the satellite, a Custom Single LNB and the frequency needs to be 11,300. I don't know if this changes across the country but this works for me here in Porirua. Then let it scan for stations, you should get lots of stations.

This is fine, but you also need to setup EPGCollector so that you get the guide, this is my EPGCollector.ini file

[GENERAL]
Output=C:\ProgramData\Geekzone\EPG Collector\TVGuide.xml
Timeouts=10,300,5
Option=USENUMERICCRID,USEIMAGE,DUPLICATESAMECHANNELS,WMCIMPORT,AUTOMAPEPG,ALLSERIES,WMCSTARSPECIAL

[DVBS]
Satellite=1600
Dish=11300000,11300000,0
TuningFile=160.0°E Optus D1.xml
ScanningFrequency=12483000,22500,3/4,H,MHEG5

The scanning frequency was the hard one to get, I ended up trying all of the ones that were specified in the tuning file.

From what I can tell having used it for a month, this is a far better option than using a DVB-T decoder, the picture is much better.