Thursday 8 November 2012

Golden Media Spark Reloaded - Linux - Enigma 2

 

I recently bought one of these STBs as it was quite cheap. 
It is Linux based and appears to work quite well. 
However it has two short comings firstly it does not support 
16APSK and 32APSK DVB-S2 modes and secondly it will 
not switch automatically from DVB-S to DVB-S2.

For my state of the art work I will continue to use a USB2 
DVB-S/S2 dongle which does not have the above deficiencies. 
For normal DVB-S reception I will use the GM box as its 
software is nice to use and it has features like a built in 
web-server and IPTV. The HDMI interface means its picture 
is much sharper than the old STBs I was using.

However it has made me think that it would be possible to use 
a Raspberry PI with one of my nice USB2 DVB-S2 dongles 
and the optional MPEG2 decoder software to make my own 
STB which would have all the facilities I would require for a 
portable setup.

On transmit I could use a DATV-Express board with DVB-S 
encoding done in the FPGA. There is not enough space for 
DVB-S2 encoding and the ARM processor would not be fast 
enough. What is missing of course is the time required to do 
it.





2 comments:

  1. I had been thinking of using the Pi as a STB - particularly like the idea it could be run in a remote location and the video streamed across the internet - not quite your plan but ffod for thought anyway. Ian.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A lot of people are using them for media players so if I leave it long enough most of the drivers will be sorted out for me (I hope).

    I have started to add IP streaming to the DATV-Express S/W but mainly so I can separate the transmitter and video sources. That is so I can broadcast from inside where it is nice and warm and the noisy transmitter can be in an unheated annexe.

    ReplyDelete