Dreambox 500s Setup with Sky into Media Center

Ok, now have my Sky card working inside my Dreambox 500s & channels piped into Media Center!

Everything I needed to do was pulled form these 2 posts:

http://www.richardcollins.net/etc_media_center_htpc.html

http://www.satpimps.com/showthread.php?t=135934 - THC post.

• install CAM package called CCcam_2.1.2 & newCS1.6 (or newer...)
• Generate BOXKEY from sky box using http://boxkey.exyucs.com/generator.php?lan=en
• edit CCcam.cfg in /var/etc
• add:
• N: [IP of Dreambox] 34000 CCcam CCcam 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14
• BOXKEY: /dev/sci0 xx xx xx xx
• SMARTCARD CLOCK FREQUENCY: /dev/sci0 3570000
• cd to /var/tuxbox/config
• edit newcs.xml
• add settings as per example in other blog posts...
• cd \var\etc
• chmod 755 CCcam.cfg

Save settings & reboot box.

please see :

http://www.richardcollins.net/etc_media_center_htpc.html

for better example of newcs.xml that includes tags...

Once you do another full transponder Scan, you should now have access to your Subscription Sky channels. (with valid sky card...)

To connect the Dreambox to media center, use: DVBLink For Dreambox

http://dvblogic.com/dreambox.php

This setup does no require any additional physical tuners, all connectivity if over IP, amazing really! Setting this up (compared to DVBLink for HDPVR) is a complete breeze.

Dreambox 500s Setup with Sky

I found this excellent post ion another blog, it has everything I am looking for this task.

http://www.richardcollins.net/etc_media_center_htpc.html

good work richard collins!

Reset Dreambox root Password

Ok, finally got around to tinkering with this recently! The box I got off eBay had the root password changed, so took a while to figure out who to change this.

You can access via telnet & http, but only if you have the root password, so only way to control the box is via the OSD connected to TV.

This is where my slingbox came in VERY handy, i never use the composite connections on the slingbox, so just hooked up the dreambox to the LAN & slingbox (ir blasters...), now I have remote access to configure it over web, or anywhere really. I'm tight on time for playing with this, so the more remote access, the better ;-)

to reset the password, I just reset the dreambox to factory default which was within one of the standard menus... nothing special there.


next, flashing the dreambox with the right firmware for the job???

The next step.....

Ok, so the DVBlink setup is solid enough now, after extensive testing. Even my girlfriend no longer complains about it, so it must be working well ;-)

Currently there is 2* 1080p screens hooked up to htpc, a 52" (living room) and a 26" in office (testing). There is 2 * xbox 360 as extenders, in master bedroom and sunroom connected via HD powerlines.

My next plan was to get a 2nd hd pvr and move the sky box from sunroom to office, then having both sky boxes & hdpvr connected to htpc & served out via media center.

I've decided to more adventurous, I purchased a dreambox s500!!

Very cheap off eBay in fairness, but there is a steep learning curve to say the least.

Once tweaked, the dreambox is capable of card sharing, so with one sky card, I can feed signal to multiple clients.

There has been some limitations that kept me away from getting into this, which have been resolved recently afiak, updating the sky card encryption.

Anyhoo, I havnt even got root access yet to the dreambox , so this will take a while.

Stay tuned for my progress.







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ITV1 HD FreeSAT in W7MC

Finally got ITV1 HD on W7MC via my DVB-S Tuner

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/87779.aspx?PageIndex=7

you'll need this:

http://www.mediafire.com/?dz4vzhzoynd

GimmeITVHD.zip

Just in time for the World Cup!

Demo of Sky HD in W7MC

Sky Movie Channel PIN entry - RESOLVED

At last, finally got around to getting this sorted with plenty help from the DVBlink forum.

So as you know, sky has PIN protection on movie channels pre-water shed,

which is a pain and will limit your movie recording via media center to after that time only.

No any longer ;-)

First, go thru the epg menus and ENABLE pin protection on all move channels,

there is a setting to do this, so anytime for all movie channels you will require PIN.

This makes it easier then to automate the PIN entry script.

I added this to my channel-change.cmd hook for use with DVBlink

here it is:

:: Change directory to the location of this CMD file.

pushd %~dp0

:: Print some debugging info in a log file named after this CMD file

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%G IN ('date /t') DO set CURDATE=%%G

FOR /f "tokens=*" %%G IN ('time /t') DO set CURTIME=%%G

echo [%CURDATE% %CURTIME%] %~n0 %* >> %~n0.log

"sky-control.exe" --sky+ --channel %1

for %%i in (301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339) do (

if "%%i" == "%1" (

C:\"Program Files (x86)"\DVBLogic\DVBLink\Data\HDPVR\hooks\sky-control.exe --sky+hd 5CCB 5CCB 5CCB 5CCB 5CCB 5C09 5C01 5C09 5C04

echo Movie channel FINISHED! sending PIN >> %~n0.log

)

)

:: TODO Check ERRORLEVEL returned by the tuning software

if '%ERRORLEVEL%'=='0' goto :END

goto :ERROR

:: Jump here with a GOTO to report an error

:ERROR

echo Error changing channel, ERRORLEVEL=%ERRORLEVEL% >> %~n0.log

exit 1

:: Jump here with a GOTO for a success

:END

echo Channel changed successfully >> %~n0.log

exit 0

5C09 5C01 5C09 5C04 is my pin, see here to get urs:

http://www.dusky-control.com/sky-control-codes.shtml

Instlled HTPC software

MediaInfo on movies ripped from Sky HD

Here is a sample of the quality achieved using my system.

Sky HD (component & optical) -> HDPVR -> W7MC -> .wtv format -> .ts format (with commercials removed VideoReDo)

Complete name : Y:\Sky HD Movie Rips\Wall-E (2008)\Wall-E (2008).ts

Format : MPEG-TS

File size : 5.78 GiB

Duration : 57mn 57s

Overall bit rate : 14.3 Mbps

Video

ID : 514 (0x202)

Menu ID : 1 (0x1)

Format : AVC

Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec

Format profile : Main@L4.0

Format settings, CABAC : Yes

Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames

Duration : 57mn 57s (whole movie not recorded...)

Bit rate : 12.9 Mbps

Width : 1 920 pixels

Height : 1 080 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 16:9

Frame rate : 25.000 fps

Resolution : 8 bits

Colorimetry : 4:2:0

Scan type : Interlaced

Scan order : Top Field First

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.249

Stream size : 5.22 GiB (90%)

Color primaries : BT.709-5, BT.1361, IEC 61966-2-4, SMPTE RP177

Transfer characteristics : BT.709-5, BT.1361

Matrix coefficients : BT.709-5, BT.1361, IEC 61966-2-4 709, SMPTE RP177

Audio

ID : 513 (0x201)

Menu ID : 1 (0x1)

Format : AC-3

Format/Info : Audio Coding 3

Duration : 57mn 57s

Bit rate mode : Constant

Bit rate : 384 Kbps

Channel(s) : 6 channels

Channel positions : Front: L C R, Surround: L R, LFE

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Stream size : 159 MiB (3%)

Language : English

Edit .wtv H264 recordings

The scheduling of the recordings from the EPG in media center is great and does work very well, however we all know that there is always adds on before and after the movie within the recording window.

It took a while to figure this one out. I wanted to be able to convert the .wtv recordings into a editable format. there are many tools out there, but all were failing for me with the .wtv format.

This is because the video recorded is encoded with H264 codec. For now these will have to be converted to another format like .ts for example. the tool i am using is VideoReDo

use the batch tool - select all your .wtv's and add them to a batch job, I saved my coverts to .ts

these .ts files then can be open in VideoReDo and you can very easily trim out the adds, and add to another batch job. repeat process for all movies and run the batch.

Organise your movie collection...

There is plenty of tools out here to pull metadata & sort your movies,

but this one seesm to be the best for me.

http://www.mymovies.dk/

The native movie browser in W7MC sucks completely, so mymovies has its own databsse and integrates very well into w7mc & extendedrs.

It will also generate tags for EVA8000 / Eva9000 (which I have & use yaay! the netgear tagging tool is very labor intensive) and also for XMBC - win win!

and if your movie collection is in a complete mess:

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/03/auto-sort-movies-into-folders.html

run this first then run mymovies and you'll be sorted!

DVBlink & Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 229

DVBlink & Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 229 = Sky HD + Freesat in Media Center. (UTV / BBC HD ect....)

Ok, so I finally got around to adding this freesat tuner to my media center. In fairness the media center setup was painless,

I didn't loose any of my existing settings / scheduled recordings. Walked thru the tuner setup as normal and for the

WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 229 tuner, i used the Astra 28.2° east (Astra 2A/2B/2C/2D) satellite for my EPG & channels.

All of this worked well. in my media center EG, I had some duplicate channels, that are available on both tuners, so

Guide Tool 1.2 (merge tuners) sorted this out for me in a flash.

As you can imagine there is a enormous amount of crap channels on freesat that I will manually deactivate, no big rush on this.

all channel listing were auto populated by native media center listings, i am looking into using my digiguide subscription to populates this as well if I am missing anything, see previous posts on how to do this.

BBC HD looks excellent!