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DVB-T STB/MPEG2 Player That Can Access SMB Shares
feanor writes "Siemens is realeasing beginning of November the Gigaset M740 AV (German text). This is a DVB-T set-top-box that can access SMB shares either via ethernet or WLAN and store its MPEG2 compliant streams. Alternatively it can be used as an MPEG2 streaming client. Other cool features include the ability to hook-up standard USB hard-drives as storage, a dual tuner architecture and a very cool design."
DVB you say? Shame that's not going to be compatible with the ATSC standard here in the states.
Maybe, one day such a device will be available here... after the Induce act fails again and is lost forever... after pigs fly, hell freezes over and the {MP|RI}AA and bit torrent get along as friends.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
SMB?? We want NFS or nothing!
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
DSB-T STB that plays MPEG2 over SMB and with so much trauam in the LBC it's kinda hard bein snoop D O Double G with my BLT. I'll be hangin over here with my WLAN wearin SPF 30 cause of the UV...
Am I the only one that had to read the title and description like 4 times to get the gist of this? I know acronyms are a fact of life but I think my brain is starting to overload on them.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Every cable company is (or has been) rolling out digital cable packages to subscribers, touting the enormous number of extra channels, insta-PPV ordering, "digital quality sound" etc. The big catch is that you're shackled to their box - all the years of cable-ready TV sets go out the window. As such, since I'm not aware of any cable companies that will let you bring your own box, cool set tops are useless to us.
RW
English translation
They could have delivered a killer box if it supported Mpeg4.
There's no way I am going to re-encode all my DivX to Mpeg-2. And I don't want to run VideoLan on my PC to encode on the fly and stream to this thing.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Dreambox is a set top box that has supported DVB for years, and it supports DVB-T (Broadcast), DVB-S (Satalite) as well as DVB-C (Cable).
t e/DM7000_featurelist.php/
http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/Bereiche/Produk
VDR has aslo been available for years to support the same standards under Linux. It is a full featured PVR with a robust plugin interface.
http://cadsoft.de/vdr/
North American viewers on the East Coast can take advantage of DVB-S & pick up a number of satalites that cover the Atlantic region. There is a wide variety of FTA programming available. My dad used to be a ham operator, I guess this is the new `ham` hobby.
I recently bought the D-Link DSM-320, which isn't a tuner, but allows you to play movies and music as well as view images from your computer, onto your TV via ethernet or 802.11b/g.
It doesn't use SMB shares, however. You run a server app on your Windows machine and tell it the directories you want to share.
I have to say I'm a bit disappointed with it so far. The biggest problem is that using the wireless, a lot of movies don't have sound. From what I have read, this is a bandwidth issue and should go away if I go with wired ethernet, but I haven't tried that yet.
It also has a number of small usability issues. It doesn't respond to the remote control very well and you need pretty direct aim and also need to sometimes press a button multiple times. It sometimes hangs and responds late to button presses, so you end up hitting a button over and over again thinking it's not getting it, only to get all the button hits several seconds later.
On the other hand, the system allows for automatic firmware upgrades (which it did the first time I connected) and it appears to have improved significantly from earlier versions, so I'm hoping it will continue to improve. I considered taking it back, but I'm going to hold onto it and just hope that the firmware upgrades will eventually remedy most of these problems.
It's nice to see more of these types of devices coming out. My real goal is to build a MythTV box because I think that's going to be more of what I'm looking for. I have a DirectTV receiver with TiVo and the TiVo is great with the exception that I can't store the movies offline and I can't access my substantial collection of TV shows from my computer with it. So I think at this point MythTV is the only way to go.
Here's a simple summary. DVB is the digital broadcasting standard used in Europe (and some other places, like Australia). DVB-T is the variant used for "T"errestrial broadcasts; DVB is also used for digital satellite (DVB-S) and cable (DVB-C). Many European countries have started doing DVB-T broadcasts, with the intention of eventually eliminating analogue transmission. There are many DVB-T set-top boxes on the market, as well as televisions with built-in DVB-T tuners. DVB-T PVRs have also started to appear. This box is sort of half-of-a-PVR. Instead of using its own internal storage, it uses an SMB share or a USB hard drive. Clever - this should reduce the price. The point of using MPEG-2 is that this is DVB's native video format. This box is not doing any encoding whatever; it's just saving a copy of the stream as it comes in from the aerial. The box only needs to be able to decode - this, too, should keep the price down.