Introduction

The Dream DM600 is a Linux based PVR manufactured by Dream Multimedia. I bought this for two reasons, firstly to use a general purpose PVR but secondly for the purpose of recording radio programmes for later listening. The radio requirement goes back a while to where I used a D-Link USB FM radio for this purpose. Despite being a bit rubbish this let me schedule (via cron on OpenBSD) recording speciality (often late-night) radio programmes, encode to mp3 and then sync with my mp3 player. By moving from the FM receiver to a FTA satellite system there's a lot more channels available.

The worst PVR in the World

As a general purpose PVR the DM600 is appalling. This is simply no way you could consider this a sensible option for normal PVR use. The on-screen interface is almost unusable, even for the simple tasks of making and playing back recordings. The favourites system, "bouquets", makes no sense. There's no 7-day EPG (as it's not a Freesat or Sky box), only now and next.

There is a Web interface which makes a few things better. Setting a recording from the Web is much easier than from the remote except for some reason you can't select a radio channel. Instead you have to set the recording for a TV channel, then edit with the on-screen interface. You can also stream live/recorded content via the Web interface. I managed to get this to work exactly once.

Now, there are other builds of the software available from groups such as PLi which are known as "images". Dream enthusiasts will tell you that you're a fool for sticking with the factory image but having tried a few I found little to choose between them. You get a slightly better/worse design style and 100s of pointless software packages but you still won't get a working EPG.

At some point my DM600 decided it didn't want to pick up the current time from the satellite feed or persist the time between restarts. I ended up having to add a NTP sync job to the startup scripts. My parents probably couldn't have done that.

I now have a Humax Foxsat HDR for normal PVR use which is in a completely different league. The interface is simple, the EPG works, series-recording works, the remote makes sense plus it's twin tuner and HD. It's also cheaper. At time of writing you can get a Foxsat for £250 and a genuine DM600 (there's lots of clones around) for £280. That's a £30 premium for an borderline unusable device with fewer features.

The best PVR in the World

But despite everything above, I still have the DM600 active. Where it simply has no competition is in connectivity and hackability, largely due to its Linux base.

Out of the box you get SMB allowing drive mapping from Windows, plus SSH access. With some effort you can install your own software and I've added a crippled version of Perl and MPlayer. The player tracks recordings using a simple text file which is easy to process via scripts.

For radio recording the DM600 means I can schedule a recording from any FTA radio station, have the raw transport stream (.ts file) converted into a mp2 (MPEG1 Layer 2 to be precise) file ready for transfer to my mp3 player. Still with scripts I can remove the recording from the PVRs media list and delete the original files.

I haven't found anything which will let me do this so easily. The Foxsat HDR does allow transfer of files onto a USB stick, but this is a long-winded manual process, and I'd still have to do the .ts translation.

I'd love to get rid of the DM600, I really would, but while there's no alternative it's safe.