Recording from a satellite feed

[Graham Cooke]

I am a projectionist for “Movies@Malmesbury”, a small rural cinema project in South West England. We screen all of the major films together with live stream operas and ballets from the Royal Opera House and theatre from the National Theatre Live programme.

Our “live” operas are very popular and we have so far been successful in booking the hall (we operate in a shared facility) for all thus far. Unfortunately, partly to do with the hall’s popularity (tiered seating etc) and partly the relative lateness of their announcing their 2024 / 5 dates, we have found that we cannot show the first event in September. Royal Opera have suggested that we record the event from the satellite feed and screen it during the week long matinee window.

We have tried to record some of their recent feed and have been spectacularly unsuccessful. We use a Technomate TM-5402 HD satellite receiver and screen the output through our Dolby IMS3000 server and NEC1202L projector.

Using a 1TB SSD drive plugged into the USB port on the Technomate we have tried three times to record live streams. Each time we have been unsuccessful, the best attempt recording only the first 1 hour and 44 minutes of a three hour opera despite the Technomate being set to record for 4 hours. An investigation of the disk shows that the files are recorded in a .ts format of about 3.9gb each.

An online search for solutions revealed that the problem may lay with Technomate’s “fussy” approach to recording on modern USB drives, suggesting that a solution might be to pay for a drive to be formatted with an “older type of (file) specification”, but we can’t help think that this would be a negative step.

Is there anyone out there who is able to record high definition satellite broadcasts (in particular those from the Royal Opera House / Ballet) and if so, what equipment do you use and / or what “fixes” have you employed to overcome problems such as ours?

Many thanks

[Philip Jones]

Is there no option on the satellite box to format the storage drive?

We use a Technisat Digiplus UHD S 4K box and have no issues recording.

[Graham Cooke]

Hi Philip, There doesn't appear to be any way of getting the Technomate to format the storage drive. Thanks for the syggestion re the Technisat; I'll have a look at it. The Technomate is rather long in the tooth and the way that audiences are reacting to our live streams, we could cover the cost of a new receiver from just a couple of screenings. Many, many thanks for your help.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I don't know about satellite receivers and their recording quirks... but assuming the HDMI out is not HDCP protected, and since you are not feeding it to a projector for the event you wish to delay present...
In a pinch, wouldn't it be possible just to use an HDMI recording deck like an ATOMOS monitor/recorder for high quality, or use a capture device and record to MP4 on a PC?

Then just build your own DCP after the fact?

That at least is where my video head goes if I was trying to bypass hardware whose own record function was on the fritz.

Even if it required stripping HDCP to get a signal on your recorder, there are ways.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Also the 4gig limit seems to line up with FAT32 fs restrictions. Does the receiver have any options to tell it to split long records into multiple files?

or would it accept a NTFS or exFAT external target drive?

[Ryan Gallagher]

Ahh yup. Page 32 of the manual has it, Fat16 and Fat32 are the only supported formats of the USB external drive. Which implies that 4gig file size limit.
https://www.technomate.com/support/TM-5402%20HD%20Manual.pdf

Limits.png


If it lacks support for splitting long records, I would see if it supports longer by saving to the internal drive (might be a more modern file system in there). Alternatively look for recording "quality" settings you can change to reduce the output file size on the USB drive. But it may not have any options there.

Failing all that and if you don't want to use an external recorder, consider an upgraded device?

[Sam Cuthbert]

Have you looked into getting a LANsat? https://www.omnex.co.uk/lansat

Not only has the live events function without a satellite dish, but records it for encore performances as well as digital DCP delivery from all the major distributors in the UK, plus acts as a NAS to expand your storage capabilities. I can't remember the last time we had a physical hard drive come to us, a year or two probably - and the last time I had to tune a satellite receiver would have been maybe 2015/2016!?

There is a cost implication, in the early days of the system they gave them out for free I seem to remember, but the time saved is well worth it in my opinion. I don't see the bills so best to enquire direct, thinks its competitive with NFT deliveries of drives.

[Carsten Kurz]

Given that SAT receivers have become so cheap these days, I would probably use two different receivers to record the feed in parallel. It is quite common at least for older receivers to only support FAT32, but they usually create split recordings without issues. Are you sure your previous attempts failed - maybe you just were not able to find the remaining parts of the split recording? Besides that - a USB connected SSD may draw too much power from a standard USB port. A decent USB stick from a serious manufacturer may be the better choice. Feed data rates are usually not a problem for a decent USB memory stick.

[Pietro Clarici]

If HDCP is not an issue (not sure) I would suggest two options:

- If you just want to record on a PC/Mac which will be your playback device, a HDMI to USB capture card will be enough. However, the very cheap (under 20€) Chinese clones are unstable and have terrible video quality in my experience. I've been using a Elgato Cam Link 4K for a couple of years with my HDMI cameras and it's pretty much perfect, it's around 130€.

- At that point, it could make sense to get a 4-port HDMI switcher with direct USB recording. If you use the hall for simple conferences and other events, the ability to record, switch sources seamlessly and livestream without a PC is nice to have, and for 300€ or so I suggest a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro. If you want 8 sources and 2 HDMI outputs for preview/program you could move up to the Mini Extreme, but at 950€ it's a pretty big jump unless you really need those features.

[Graham Cooke]

Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has read through my post and come back with all manner of suggestions. I thik we now have a clear way forward and will update when we implement our plans. In the meantime, many, many thanks.

Graham

[Ryan Gallagher]

If HDCP is not an issue (not sure) I would suggest two options:

- If you just want to record on a PC/Mac which will be your playback device, a HDMI to USB capture card will be enough. However, the very cheap (under 20€) Chinese clones are unstable and have terrible video quality in my experience. I've been using a Elgato Cam Link 4K for a couple of years with my HDMI cameras and it's pretty much perfect, it's around 130€.

- At that point, it could make sense to get a 4-port HDMI switcher with direct USB recording. If you use the hall for simple conferences and other events, the ability to record, switch sources seamlessly and livestream without a PC is nice to have, and for 300€ or so I suggest a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro. If you want 8 sources and 2 HDMI outputs for preview/program you could move up to the Mini Extreme, but at 950€ it's a pretty big jump unless you really need those features.

While great tools in a pinch. If you are serious about quality and DCPs are your target format, I would avoid the capture-card/stream-style record devices (which can generally only record to lossy compressed formats). Instead op for one of those on-camera monitor/recorders that can at least do ProresLT or Prores422. But all suggestions are likely to beat the quality produced by the records in the satellite receivers, so hard to go wrong there. Hell the satellite feed is probably MPEG too... so debatable if HQ recording is even warranted, but useful as a tool at other times. (all assuming HDCP compliance is not required, which it might be).

[Steve Moore]

Hi Graham,
What I do is record in on a (very old now) Humax Foxsat. The problem is they are getting a bit long in the tooth, but can be picked up quite cheap on eBay. They have to be the later model and you have to go into a hidden menu to tune into Intelsat. I also had to write an instruction sheet for the users at the other cinemas in our group to aid them with tuning and recording. Having said that they have generally worked fine for ROH and NT Live.I saw Sam's comment on LANsat - and where this used to be a brilliant solution back in the day and worked really well. Unfortuantly Lansat stopped the ability to be able to use Lansat for Satellite around 2021 (perhaps we should just call the unit a Lan now!) so that is non-starter.