DM500 dreambox

Dreambox is a satelite receiver that runs on a linux OS. This makes it a perfect toy to do fun stuff with it. One of the things I use it for is watching TV, but not only on my TV in the living room but on every network connected device that has VLC installed. Or even a mobile phone for example. I can change channels and the quality of the stream remotely so that I have a stream that best fits the device I am using at that moment. The priciple is to use a server who reads the stream from the dreambox then encodes this stream to the desired format and restream it to the client. VLC can do this by acting as a client and server the same time. I haven’t invented this myself but found a site that explains how to setup and provides the code for that. If you have a dreambox and a server with apache and VLC you are ready to go. In no time you are watching TV on your mobile phone from the other side of the world. Or following the finals from work on one of the sports channels that only your box can receive via cardsharing  More on cardsharing in one of the next posts.