Just before the holidays, we got ourselves a Dreambox DM8000, an HD-capable set-top box and personal video recorder. The hardware features look good: twin DVB-S2 tuner build in, 2 free slots for additional tuners, e.g. for DVB-T or -C reception. It has 4 CI (Common Interface) slots for Conditional Access Modules (CAM’s), and 2 smartcard readers. Under the hood is a 400MHz MIPS processor, running a special linux, named “Enigma2” from a flash-chip. An optional harddisk and (slimline) DVD-reader are also available, but you have to build them in yourself. Doing so was really easy, as all screws and connectors are provided.
The installed software is descent, tunes fast and didn’t crash (yet). It supports decoding multiple channels from a single multiplex (known as multirec in the MythTV-world). The manual (local copy) could be more thorough, though. The recording-scheduling simply sucks, especially if you’re used to MythTV’s scheduling.
