Patatafrita Blog

Posted by supervisor on March 2nd, 2011 in Shopping

The Dreambox is a series of Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television receivers (set-top box), produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia. The Linux-based software used by Dreambox was originally developed for DBox2, by the Tuxbox project. The Dbox2 was a proprietary design distributed by KirchMedia for their pay TV services. The bankruptcy of KirchMedia flooded the market with unsold boxes available for Linux enthusiasts. The Dreambox shares the basic design of the DBox2, including the Ethernet port and the PowerPC processor.

Its firmware is officially user-upgradable, since it is a Linux-based computer, as opposed to third-party “patching” of alternate receivers. All units support Dream’s own DreamCrypt conditional access (CA) system, with software-emulated CA Modules (CAMs) available for many alternate CA systems. The built-in Ethernet interface allows networked computers to access the recordings on the internal hard disks on some Dreambox models. It also enables the receiver to store digital copies of DVB MPEG transport streams on Network file systems or broadcast the streams as IPTV to VideoLAN and XBMC Media Center clients. Unlike many PC based PVR systems that use free-to-air type of DVB receiver cards, the built-in conditional access allows receiving and storing encrypted content.

In 2007, Dream Multimedia also introduced a non-Linux based Dreambox receiver, the DM100, their sole to date, running on unspecified hardware, but still featuring an Ethernet port and a USB port. The speed of the USB port is not specified, the manufacturer only says it is of B type, the one found on peripherals connected to PCs.

The DM500 is the successor to the DM5620 and is the smallest and cheapest Dreambox. It is based around an IBM STBx25xx Digital Set-Top Box Integrated Controller, featuring notably a 252 MHz PowerPC processor subsystem, hardware MPEG-2 video and audio decoding and smart card interfaces. The DM500 features 32 MiB of RAM and an unspecified amount of flash memory, probably 8 MB, given that firmware images are about 5 MiB. It has the standard features of a free-to-air (FTA) satellite receiver, plus extensive Fast Ethernet networking connectivity and a single smart card reader. It does not feature a 7-segment LED display, normally found in other FTA decoders.

Also has the ability to be used on Digital satellite, cable and terrestrial broadcasts (also known as DVB-S, DVB-C, DVB-T).

The DM500+ model has 96 MiB of RAM instead of 32, and 32 MiB of NAND flash instead of 8 MiB of NOR flash. This makes it similar to the DM600 PVR model. It is only available in DVB-S versions.

The new DM500HD was announced in Koln on May 26, 2009. The price will be between €350 and €400.