peen.net, home of the NiElS » Dreambox and VLC

Dreambox is a linux-based TV-tuner (satellite or terrestrial reception) with network support. The following example demonstrates how to stream video content from a PC by means of VLC (freeware; VideoLan project) to be displayed on the TV attached to the Dreambox.

peen.net, home of the NiElS » Dreambox and VLC:
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Dreambox and VLC

When I moved to my current home I had to buy a satellite receiver as there was no cable. Being a Linux user I wanted a Linux based receiver. At the time there wasn’t much choice and I ended up with a Dreambox 7000S.
I’m not going to tell you anything about satellite reception. There are many websites out there that do so already.

But the dreambox has more uses. One thing I use it for almost daily is to watch video. Whether DVD’s or Internet content, I prefer using the dreambox because it limits the number of devices I need to connect to my TV and home-cinema.

Being a Linux user I mount the dreambox harddisk using NFS. Windows users can use Samba provided in most dreambox firmwares. I then use VLC te recode the movie:

vlc –noosd INPUTFILE –sout
‘#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=2048,scale=1,
acodec=mpga,ab=256,channels=2}:duplicate{
dst=std{access=file,mux=ts,url=”OUTPUTFILE“}}’
–sout-transcode-fps 25
–sout-transcode-width 704
–sout-transcode-height 576

If you have the dreambox audio connected using an optical cable you can change the acodec to ac3. When using ac3 you can also change channels to 6 and increase the ab (audio bitrate) to get the full cinema experience."