Hello you all, as a new member I wish you the best.

I found about Dream Multimedia Box reading a Linux magazine review of it here in Italy, and being a PPC owner and interested about PowerPC devices, soon I started thinking these boxes should be pretty good.

Also, then, I had some talks with my friends here in Italy who own satellite TV decoders and they told me that Dream Multimedia Dreamboxes are very beautyful devices...

WOW!

They know well of the existence of DreamBox, while I was aware of it. They made myself feel as a newbie regarding satellite and DVB-TV decoders.
I just couldn't believe my ears. As being well known and appreciated, so yours must be very good pieces of hardware.

Here are my questions:

I read on the linux magazine where I found Dreambox for the very first time that the hardware is capable to save only MPEG 2, because PPC CPU has only 250MHz. No DiVX encoding on the fly while recording on HD.
What a pity!

If it had could recorded DiVX, it could had been a very good solution for my home recording, saving space on media (no HD consumption and only a few DVD media to buy).

So I want to ask if you from dream-multimedia team have evaluated other PPC solution with more horsepower to obtain more performance.

Q1 - Did you evaluated some?

As being owner of a Pegasos II machine which can clock PPC G3 600 MHz or PPC G4 at 1 GHz with full Altivec support I wonder if you have some chance to evaluate the Pegasos motherboard as base of your systems.

Sure I will buy one Dreambox based on Pegasos.

Then with more Megahertz power it should being capable to perform even DiVX enconding on the fly while recording on HDDs.

Also, as being proud owner of such this beautiful motherboard, instead of a Pegasos based Dreambox complete system, I could buy a "media-center assembing kit" (sort of all-in-one package with all hardware and instructions to pimp my computer) which you can sell to me...

And you will be not limited to me. You could sell it to other users who own same computer model.

Q2 - Do you think that in the future, you could assemble and sell on the market a "mock-up standalone kit" capable to transform Pegasos into a complete multimedia system like Dreambox?

Sure if you could create such as a mock-up kit, then it could became the perfect companion for Pegasos line of computers.

Pegasos are very open machines and they also can run many linux flavours.

Here are some informations about it:

http://www.pegasosppc.com/pegasos.php

There are more than 5000 users of Pegasi worldwide (some of us extimated the number in a forum thread some times ago), and the number is increasing due to the linux owners who had choosen it.

3500 people use Pegasos as standard linux machine.

1500 of us pegasos owners, use it as Amiga computer thanks to MorphOS Operating Systems which is the evolution of that beautiful OS. But we are not only limited to it, because of the multiboot capabilities of Pegasos Firmware.

This could be for you of a little market of reference to emerge more in multimedia world.

To end my topic, I think (IMHO) that the very difficulty will be to find correct multimedia (satellite and TV cards) capable to fit in Pegasi, and create scripts to let linux to drive these cards well, in order to leave the end user (such as me) free to use the machine without the harrasment to test all the hardware it all by himself, and simply by putting in the case the hardware you will sell as standalone kit.

I think that a multimedia standalone kit solution sold by you could noteworthy ease the work of the end user.

I hope you could answer me soon regarding my two main doubts.

Sincerely,

Raffaele