# FreeBSD based STB



## balanga (Oct 20, 2014)

Would it be possible to develop  a FreeBSD-based set top box for receiving satellite broadcasts? There are some Linux based devices using a Linux variant called Enigma2  which has become a standard on open source based set top boxes such as Dreambox compatible boxes.


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## SirDice (Oct 20, 2014)

The difficult part comes from finding a satellite card with driver support for FreeBSD. There have been some Hauppauge cards that were supported, but I'm not sure what the status of them is.


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## balanga (Oct 20, 2014)

SirDice said:


> The difficult part comes from finding a satellite card with driver support for FreeBSD. There have been some Hauppauge cards that were supported, not sure what the status of them is.



Do you mean having a device driver for a DVB-S card?


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## SirDice (Oct 20, 2014)

balanga said:


> Do you mean having a device driver for a DVB-S card?


Yes. I see the Hauppauge drivers have been removed from the ports tree. I'm not sure if there are any other drivers in the ports tree for capture cards.


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## kpa (Oct 20, 2014)

As far as I understand the multimedia/webcamd port has support for some USB DVB-T/C/S cards. I have no personal experience with it though.


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## hselasky@ (Oct 24, 2014)

FYI: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WebcamCompat


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## SirDice (Oct 24, 2014)

I used to have a TV card that used the bktr(4) driver. It worked reasonably well with MPlayer and a few other applications. I was able to watch TV on my FreeBSD desktop. The driver still exists but is quite old now and I'm not sure if it still works properly on recent FreeBSD versions. It's a fairly simple chipset too, probably only usable for SD content. I don't think there are any recent cards that are based on the Bt848 chips.


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## hselasky@ (Oct 24, 2014)

There is also CX88: http://corona.homeunix.net/cx88wiki/


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## nox@ (Dec 31, 2014)

Yes you can use multimedia/webcamd to get DVB-S(2) /dev/dvb drivers.  Some more info is here:  https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/digital-tv-dvb-atsc-on-freebsd-a-small-guide.35179/

HTH, 
Juergen


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