Dreambox 7000 - Hints and Tips V.2

Features

Q. What can DREAMBOX do?

A. This is an open-ended question, and personally I have not had time to do more than scratch the surface of the capabilities of this box. The short answer is that it depends how much time and interest you have in finding things out, and whether you enjoy using software that's a little bit "beta" (not completely finished). But as standard (straight out of the box) the DREAMBOX supports:

• DiSeqC switches (up to 4 ways), and DiSeqC motorised dishes
• Auto set-up: Automatic scanning of satellites. You tell it which satellite(s) you can receive, then ENIGMA scans all the known transponder frequencies on each satellite. The transponder info comes from an XML file that can be updated when things change - or you can manually specify a transponder frequency to scan. This makes for fast, easy initial set-up. There is also a good display of Signal Strength (SNR), AGC level and BER (bit error rate) which is very helpful for aligning your dish. That said, the box occasionally hangs and needs to be rebooted if it doesn't see a signal for a long time. The current software can be told to store only FTA channels, so that you don't clutter up your channel list with useless pay-channels.
• Fast channel changing, with good EPG support. Very impressive speed. You can view the channels in various ways (by satellite, by bouquet, by name, by favourite categories). The EPG support looks comprehensive, though as usual it depends how much info the broadcaster sends - and the German channels are much better than the UK channels in this regard.
• Record (and/or Pause) Live TV and Radio. While watching or listening, press VIDEO to toggle the recording menu buttons on and off. Quick and easy, full quality recordings are made to the hard disk or to the NFS share.
• Timed Recordings. Select "DREAM/Timer" to set up a schedule of recordings of TV or radio. Recordings can be browsed by selecting "DREAM/File Mode". (Hint: press RED key to delete a recording).
• Network streaming - facilities are provided to stream audio and video to and from an Ethernet network, and to control the box remotely (currently a bit incomplete).
• Remote administration - The DREAMBOX may be configured over the Ethernet from your PC, if you look for the right software. This is a convenient way to perform updates etc.
• Sky Digital TV - I have not confirmed this myself, but apparently there is a "Softcam" for Dreambox which allows you to watch pay-channels from Sky Digital UK provided that you have a valid Sky viewing card for the channels you wish to watch. This has the potential to be a real competitor to Sky's own Sky+ PVR. The official Sky+ box may have a better EPG, but then it attracts a premium monthly fee on top of the pay-TV fees. The snag with the Softcam is that it isn't authorised by NDS, so it isn't in the official Dreambox images. The world-of-digital.com forums may have the info needed to get this working, but this is underground software, so you might not want it running on your home LAN. I am a little suspicious of software that can only be had from password-protected forums.

Q. What can't DREAMBOX do?

A. Well DREAMBOX is very powerful, but it does not have infinite amounts of CPU and RAM resources - that's why it's a small cheap box that doesn't need a fan.

• X-Windows applications - DREAMBOX does not run XFree86 as standard. Maybe it would work, but I think X would really need more RAM, and a faster CPU. If I understand it correctly, Enigma provides a lightweight GUI API targetted for cheap hardware like set-top boxes, and the actual display drawing takes place through the Linux Framebuffer graphics drivers, not through X.
• Internet access - DREAMBOX could be used as an internet access device. Some software can even update the DREAMBOX automatically from the internet. But, I think it is not helpful to use the DREAMBOX for web browsing or writing email (we have PCs and laptops for that). OK, you can probably find mail and web programs for DREAMBOX, but with only 64 MBytes of RAM it might cause problems, and of course the CPU also has to be used to process broadcast programme content. But I may be proved wrong! Maybe a small web browser will work OK with the IR keyboard that is about to appear - who knows, perhaps 64 MBytes is still enough for a cut-down Linux version: just because Windows XP likes 256 MBytes, that's no reason why Linux needs to be so bloated! Still, I guess lack of "X" means no Mozilla.
• Bugs. These are early days, so don't buy this box if you aren't happy to put up with a few glitches while the software development continues. The most annoying bug found so far is that browsing the list of recordings hangs the box unless you've made at least one recording since the movie directory was initialised. Perhaps this doesn't apply with an internal hard disk, but it does seem to be the case with an NFS network share (see NFS section below). Also on one occasion, the Dreambox would not boot for some reason (vertical stripes on the splash screen), and only repeated three-finger salutes brought it back to life (hold down all three buttons for a cold reboot).
  With the official firmware 1.07.1, I saw badly stuttering playback of video recordings. The problem was cured by setting NFS to UDP mode, with rsize and wsize parameters set to 4096 and rebooting (see NFS section below). Note that mounting NFS in TCP mode can cause very long delays at boot time (several minutes) after a reboot. I suspect this is due to the NFS server (at least with FreeBSD) ignoring unexpected TCP sequence numbers until a timeout has expired: the source port number will be the same on each boot, which probably confuses the server.