Hello

Just about to look into bringing some Dreamboxes into the country.  These funky little boxes are about the size of two VCR tapes ontop of each other and can be used to pickup Freeview if you have a Satellite interface in it.  Or connect to the cable Network in Wellington / Chch and replace the existing rubbish STB with this thing, of course you will need to take the Decoder card out of the STB and put it into this box, and it's most probably against the TCL T&C's to do this.

It's runs linux and can save streaming video to your PC over the network (using SMB/NFS/CIFS), done this with freeview last week and it was pretty sweet.  Turned up as a MPEG2 stream.  Also kinda nice that these boxes have been heavily hacked over with about 8-9 different ports.  Like the Linksys WRT54G but for Satellite / Cable TV.

The boxes I am looking at come out of China, but the person I am dealing with seems very helpful, and others have recommended me to him.

I suggest you google for Dreambox, DM500 (no harddisk) or DM600 (can take 2.5" harddisk for recordings) to find out more.

If anyone is interested please PM me and I will look into making an order.