Review: anysee E7 PS2

anysee has been around for quite some time now, focusing their efforts on DVB solutions for PC. At least in the western civilization, their success seemed to be somewhat attenuated. This may change with the DVBSHOP soon providing the E7 series, quite an interesting CI solution by anysee. I had the oportunity to have a look at the E7 PS2.

The E7 PS2 is an internal expansion card. It can either be mounted to a PCI or PCIe slot. These connectors are purely mechanical however. The electrical interface is realized via USB 2.0. Like front USB panels, the card is connected to a standardized 9 pin socket on the mainboard. The 500mA that USB can deliver of course is not enough to power the E7 PS2, so a further connection to the PSU via 4-pin molex has to be established.

On the left hand side picture, one may see a selfmade cable to connect the E7 PS2 via an external USB type A plug.








The card is very well made and when having a closer look, one may find quite some quality parts, for example the Samsung can tuner which is well shielded against electromagnetic interference. It is based on STmicroelectronics RF (STV6110) and demodulator (STV0903). In theory this means that the tuner is capable of performing a full band blindscan. Anysee is not providing software support for this feature however, so there is no possibility to activate it and no API to read back the correct parameters (modulation, symbolrate a.s.o.) from the hardware.

The USB bridge, a Cypress EZ-USB FX2LP, is nothing to write home about, known to work reliably however. One may find Cypress USB bridges inside TechnoTrend and TeVii products as well. As is the case with all USB DVB devices, also the E7 PS2 acts a bit sluggish, taking a bit longer to initialize or delivering a stream after tuning. We are talking about few hundreds of milliseconds however, so nothing that the average user will recognize.

On the back of the PCB one may find the most exciting part, a Xilinx CPLD, which may be running the CI stack in hardware. The great CAM compatibility of the E7 PS2 supports this theory, even working flawlessly together with more exotic modules like the unicam or Diablo Light/Diablo2, definitely one of the better CI products I tested so far.


From a hardware point of view the E7 PS2 is a pretty sophisticated product. But the best hardware is nothing without a decent BDA driver. I used a recent driver from the anysee homepage, dated 2011-03-25. Installation is quite easy. Users don't have to mess with the device manager. An installer takes care of all this stuff. After installation, the card worked flawlessly inside WMC, including a transparent operation of the CI.
A nice addition is the tray tool, adding the possibility to access the CAM menu via CI MMI.

The card also passed my TransEdit tests by reliably locking transponders and delivering a clean stream, even the bigger ones on Hot Bird (e.g. 12476H, 8PSK, 27500 KS/s, 3/4).

Something I do not like about the E7 PS2 is that LNB voltage is not switched off, when the tuner is not in use, which means that multiswitch and LNB are fully powered, in my case drawing more than 10W.
[Update 2011-05-01]
anysee has just released a new driver version (dated 2011-04-21), adding the possibility to turn off LNB voltage after a user-defined timeout.

Cypress and STmicroelectronics parts may have also been a good pick when it comes to Linux support, as drivers already exist.