I’ve been looking for a sensible solution to the whole media centre problem for quite a while now, I’m currently living with a Topfield FreeView (DVB-T in the UK) box, a Humax FreeSat (DVB-S in the UK) box [which I haven’t really used much yet], a separate DVD player and a separate surround amp.

This is all a bit of a nightmare, all the boxes get very hot (and are in a closed cabinet), the video source switching doesn’t always work, sometimes you get the sound switch but not the video etc, etc, etc.

I want a single device that does dual DVB-T, timeshifting/recording and has a DVD player in it. If possible, additional support for DVB-S would be great.

This simply doesn’t exist ... the Reelbox looked like an option, but it looks complex and they have no plans to support FreeView properly, or to handle the MHEG-5 requirements (Red Button.) There’s one other box available in Australia that looked interesting, but you can’t get it here, and it almost certainly wouldn’t work properly with the UK D-Book standards.

It’s nearly 2009 and we still can’t do a decent job of it!

What about the media centres? ... Well, in theory, these would be the right answer, however I have yet to find one that really works properly and is easy enough to use that it would pass the wife test. I have a morbid fear of relying on Windows for a critical part of the household infrastructure, and the Linux ones just seem to have usability issues. Recent experiments with Myth for example really demonstrate that the live TV piece (with timeshift) is a bit of an add-on ... the channel change time was several seconds and looking at the developer mailing lists they don’t see this as a problem. Also, Myth is a good example of something that’s far too complex, yes it’s very feature rich, but the tuner setup alone is a black art!

I’m a great fan of Mac’s, and the Mac Mini would be an ideal set-top-box platform, however again there isn’t a really viable answer ... EyeTV is great, but not properly integrated into the rest of Front Row, plus the choice of hardware is very limited.

So, if you can’t find what you want off-the-shelf ... build it yourself!

About six months ago I experimented with building the start of a set-top-box on the Mac, using a USB tuner (I had to write a user-mode USB driver!) and OpenGL. I got to the point of receiving and decoding live TV but had major problems trying to get a dual-tuner device working.

Next I decided to use a Linksys NSLU2 device as a “network tuner”, i.e. plug the USB tuner into that, run Linux on it to get use of the great DVB stack and pump the DVB stream over the network. That worked ok, but I got a bit sidetracked, and it all petered out...

Roll on to Summer 2008 ... yet another troll of the market revealed the gap is still there. I will try again...

So, this time I will acknowledge that Linux is probably the best platform for deployment - lots of cheap hardware available, great DVB support, and plenty of libraries to make development easier. BUT I have a long commute, plenty of ‘train time’ and a MacBook, so developing on the Mac seemed sensible ... so, if I stick to standard libraries, make use of SDL and OpenGL I should be able to get it to work exactly the same on both platforms!

And so it does ... well, maybe not exactly, but it’s close enough.