Linux-Powered PVR/Satellite Machine

spicyjack writes "After reading this story, I thought this submit would be appropriate. A German company called Dream-Multimedia-TV has come up with a schweet custom box targeted for the PVR/Satellite markets. How about a machine with a 250Mhz IBM PowerPC, 2 SmartCard readers, one CompactFlash slot, UDMA66 IDE, MPEG2 support with MPEG4 (DivX) support on the way, Ethernet, LCD display, SPDIF out, yada yada yada (zipped User's Manual). Oh, and it is built specifically to run Linux. Available right now. Commence hacking!"

Comments

with a price tag of?

[Anonymous Coward]

aieee... how cheap can they get that box for nowadays?

less than $100???

grumble grumble... when i was a kid... 64 k was a whizbang computer... 300 baud modems... acoustic... uphill, in the snow, both ways....

damn kids...

I wish I could find some good Linux PVR software

[dcstimm]

I wish I could find some good Linux PVR software, tried mythtv but its only recommended with use with a tv out and a tv set and a remote, I need one I can use on my monitor with mouse support (so I can scroll up and down with my mouse).. Plus it needs to have smooth playback, unlike mythtv, I have dual p3 700mhz cpus, and mythtv runs like a dog on them.

Right now in linux I use "Vcr" to record tv shows, with this script:
#!/bin/bash
killall motv
killall xawtv
killall -9 vcr
vcr -g /dev/video0 -c 'divx ;-) low-motion' -v -p 40 -F 23 -q 100 -m mono -b 64 -t 60m savedshow.avi

Re:I wish I could find some good Linux PVR softwar

[parnold]

try freevo, it can work quite well with a monitor & mouse. http://freevo.sourceforge.net

TiVo

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

TiVo already has a box like this. No, it doesn't have as many features. It's also $199.

DirecTV DVR powered by TiVo (basically a renamed Series II combo box) has a 200mhz MIPS processor, 32M of RAM, 2 tuners, hardware MPEG2 decoding, 40GB disk, USB 2.0, etc.

It's also powered by Linux.

Better picts

[new500]

Here

that's http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/cat/pictures.php 4 for the still Goat conscious

Re:$499 euros?

[Enahs]

Either you're just trolling, or a bit slow, or both, but if you really think that clock speed is all that counts, obviously you've never worked with PowerPCs.

A word of warning

[zztzed]

A word of warning to any Slashdotters who are thinking this might be a nice way to get around paying for a DirecTiVo (or DirecTV DVR as I think they're calling the Series 2 ones) or DishPVR:

I've looked into building my own satellite PVR, and from what I learned, I think I can safely say that this box in all likelihood will not work with DirecTV or Dish Network. DirecTV uses its own proprietary encryption scheme which isn't supported by anything but DTV-licensed receivers, and while Dish Network uses Nagravision encryption, which is supported by some things (like Hauppauge's WinTV DBS card), they marry their smartcards to their receivers, so a Dish Network smartcard will only work in the receiver in which it was first activated unless you hack it (and even then it may not work outside a Dish Network receiver). Basically, this thing is useless unless you want to use it to record free-to-air satellite broadcasts.

Re:A word of warning

[general_re]

Good post. Glad to see good posts still exist around here ;)

DirecTV uses its own proprietary encryption scheme which isn't supported by anything but DTV-licensed receivers, and while Dish Network uses Nagravision [nagravision.com] encryption, which is supported by some things (like Hauppauge's WinTV DBS card), they marry their smartcards to their receivers, so a Dish Network smartcard will only work in the receiver in which it was first activated unless you hack it (and even then it may not work outside a Dish Network receiver).

I'd only add one small thing to this. You're absolutely right about not being able to pick up DTV channels - DirecTV has their own proprietary scheme which is incompatible with DVB. But Dish, OTOH, does broadcast some channels unencrypted, which you can pick up with a DVB receiver - the Lyngsat site can tell you which ones are FTA.

Of course, the channels people want for free (HBO, Showtime, whatever) are all encrypted by Dish, so thinking a DVB receiver will get you free HBO is hopeless, as you rightly point out.

Sony's Vaio Solution [Slightly OT]

[zwoelfk]

For anyone interested in an out-of-the-box solution for PVR/DVD -> VCD, etc. Check out Sony's Vaio PCV-W102 (I think it's only available in Japan, though)

As a programmer, I like to tweak with my boxes, but this is so cool by default, I don't even want to mess with it! 1.6GHz Celeron (Could be worse!), 256MB Ram (512MB would be much better, but what the hell!), DVD/CDRW, Tuner (coax-in only, unfortunately), all-in-one integrated AV remote (however, can't use remote as a mouse, that's too bad...), memory card slot, 2 PCMCIA slots, 3 USB, 2 Firewire, Widescreen flat 15.5" display (it looks sweet!), etc. It's has Windows XP installed, but it has lots of cool-ass software for ripping music and video, so I'll leave it be.

Anyway, Cygwin now has support for rootless mode under X, so I'm running all my favorite apps (esp. Konsole!) seamlessly.

It's not a set top box, but it did completely replace my TV/DVD/VCR setup, and I'm stoked about it!

It cost me around 170000JPY at the Sony store.

Re:250MHz and DivX?

[User 956]

But, isn't 250MHz just a little slow for mpeg4/divx encoding?

You've obviously fallen for the Wintel zealots' Megahertz Myth. A 250Mhz machine with a PowerPC processor is more powerful than a dual 3Ghz Xeon machine, in every benchmark. (Photoshop *cough* *cough* Photoshop).

Want proof? just step a little closer to Jobs' reality distortion field.

Re:I wish I could find some .... USE MythTV!!

[catch23]

There was a slashdot article sometime back that mentioned MythTV. Last weekend, I loaded up the debian packages (although I had to manually install xmltv since the deb packages were old) and all I can say is wow! It's been running stable for the last 4 days and I've already recorded more than 20 programs. It does that Tivo-ish time-shifting stuff which I find really cool, but somewhat useless for my purposes since I use MythTV mostly for recording stuff. Plus, it's got a pretty nice web interface so I can still start the recording even when i'm away from the computer.... (just by accessing the mythweb frontend through apache/php)

So far it allows you to use two codecs (nuppelvideo and mpeg4) but for some reason I get a bit better performance with the nuppelvideo stuff so I stuck with that. But I think the really big selling point of MythTV isn't the ability to record, do timeshifting, or access via the web... it's about it's really, really nice graphical interface. You just really have to see for yourself to believe it. I feel like a born-again couch potato!

MythTV debian packages are here.

Re:$499 euros?

[Tim Browse]

My question is what speed PowerPC does the tivo use?

50MHz.

Tim

Re:250MHz and DivX?

[Klaruz]

Jeeze man, look at the date on the page. Sept 99. A quick google says that in sept 99 the fastest pc cpu was a 600mhz p3. I believe 450mhz g3s were shipping at the time.

I'm not going to get into the differences in the chips at the time, but apple's ads were pretty accurate. Today is a different story though.

Please step away from your distortion field.