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Re: [LUG] OT - BT Vision was Small Wireless Access Points?

 

Grant Sewell wrote:
On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:31:18 +0100
Rob Beard wrote:

Dan Lewis wrote:
I was out shopping for a new package deal for my friend and for 360 swedish krowns a month - 30 pounds he got an entry level TV box
with 720p and recording - like the one sky does in the uk. then
there was a 20 mb internet connection, home telephone line and
mobile phone contract with calls to mobiles costing 29ore per min
which is about 2.5p. My point is all of this comes into the house
through a combination of cables from the phone jack see here for diagram
http://www.telia.se/privat/kundservice/support/tv/digitaltv/guider/installation_digitalbox.page
or here for brochure showing real units
http://www.telia.se/files/Inst_handb_TeliaDigiTV_B.pdf

Just had a look at the links, it actually looks like it works in a similar way to BT Vision and Tiscalli TV which are both IPTV based systems. BT Vision for instance is a custom Freeview PVR which can stream on demand content (standard definition only) over the ADSL connection and download stuff in high definition (720p). Wasn't a bad system apart from the fact it was locked into BT and without a BT connection the box was pretty much useless, although it can be
modified to run Linux with a bit of hardware hacking (I believe it
requires some sort of chip to get round the protections).

If BT don't ask for my old box back, I'll look at getting mine done
so I can re-use it.  I seem to recall reading that the BT Vision
hardware is similar to the Popcorn Hour box.

Rob


Apparently the BT Vision box runs Microsoft Mediaroom:
http://tinyurl.com/ydrph6n

Grant.

Yep albeit a cut down version.

I've been reading up a bit about it, some folks have managed to create their own WindowsCE applications (I gather they are .Net and can be written using Visual Studio) and have added new features such as streaming from the internet etc.

What I'm interested though is getting Linux running on the box. From what I understand they now have video and audio playback working although I presume it's early days. How I see it though is if I can get Linux on there then maybe eventually it could be maybe used as some sort of media playback device (not sure if it could maybe be a MythTV frontend or something).

If all else fails I'll just whip out the hard drive and use it in something else. Does seem a shame though just to chuck it on the scrap heap because of some BT specific firmware.

Rob


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