What is a D-Box exactly?

2cvbloke

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And what could someone like me do with it? I have read about them on the ebay auctions like the Nokia one (looks like the Nokia 9600S satellite box) having a SCSI port for exporting video to a computer for PVR stuff, but other than that, what's all the hype about?
 

Analoguesat

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Some of them are cable boxes.

Others are a bit like dreamboxes.
 

2cvbloke

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Analoguesat said:
Some of them are cable boxes.

Others are a bit like dreamboxes.

I guess by the amount of them on eBay they're not very reliable?
 

wod

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surprised they dont shift as aint them the ones that can get the channels on enteel /bellywest for free ?
 

rolfw

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Yes wod, but we don't talk about that. ;)
 

2cvbloke

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wod said:
surprised they dont shift as aint them the ones that can get the channels on enteel /bellywest for free ?

Ah, gotcha... ;)
 

Blue4Ever

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There are two types of Dbox2 (and make sure its a 2) one for Cable and One for Sat the good thing about the dbox is that its Linux based software so you can change a lot more on the software in fact you can use the same Enigma software as the Dreambox with a slight difference.

The are hundreds of European sites that support the Dbox but get Firefox with a translation plugin as there are very few in English there mostly German.

You can pre-load all Cams into the software so no need to buy an extermal cam for any viewing card and all of these are readilly available for download. Most of the images are the same for Cable or Sat and auto detect the type of box you have installed it on, hence you can't get sat on a cable box and vice versa.

If you are thinking of buying one you need to make sure that its in Dbug Mode, that means you have hot wired the Flash Memory to except additional software and you can then use an number of Dbox tools to write a new image to the box.

There are currently 3 versions Sagem,Nokia and Phillips about but the Phillips are rare and supposed to be better in sat than Cable versions. The sagem is built like a tank but people report that they can give problems when using diseqc 1.2 to control a motor its a bit hit and miss. The nokia arent too bad

But yoiu need to check the chip configuration on them as they have a number of versions that except different image formats
1x chip
2xAMD
2Xintel

if you flash a 1x to a 2x box it will need some additional sofware to recover

All In All they are good at what they do provide easy linux based software with all the functionallity of the Dreambox in fact the Dreambox seems to be built on the Dbox format.

Blue4Ever
 

Rupert

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2cvbloke said:
And what could someone like me do with it? I have read about them on the ebay auctions like the Nokia one (looks like the Nokia 9600S satellite box) having a SCSI port for exporting video to a computer for PVR stuff, but other than that, what's all the hype about?

Nokia dbox 1 (first version) was the best digital receiver in 90's, with "alternative" DVB2000-firmware. Some versions of dbox1/nokia9500 have so called auto-symbolrate tuner, which was useful for satellite dx because no other receivers had it during 1997...99. With SCSI-connection dbox1 could be used to record video to computer and play mp3-music from pc. That was years before Skystar cards and dreamboxes.

dbox2 (second generation) came later and can run Linux. It has rj45-local area network connection instead SCSI. If using with Linux, it can be compared to dreambox :)
 
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