Dreambox 500C in India

[raulb]

Hi Guys,

I have spend the last week trying to understand Dreambox and boy is it complicated and I am pretty familiar with tech. This has by far been the most time consuming distraction since I started mucking about with Linux ages ago. I found this forum 2 days ago and it seems it has most of the answers I need. I have been all over the place and read hundreds of forum posts and the information is scattered and difficult to understand for a newbie.

I am not really a TV buff and honestly hardly watch it nowdays, the more I think about why I am spending so much time on this the more I realise how much of a time waster over useless hacks I don't really need I have become.

I have both satellite and digital cable TV. I am located in Pune, India. I recently got the cable set top box which is a Dizipia 33001R with IRDETO ZETA Version 5.3. I got in into my head to build a PVR but all the outputs are analog which doesn't make much sense. After a bit of research the only way to capture digital output would be something like a Tecnotrend DVB-C cable card/Skystar DVB-C card with considerable hackery or a stb like dreambox. That was a week ago and I am pretty exhausted trying to understand dreambox.

I don't want to share the card or get cable for free or anything like that, I want to use the IRDETO card to get the cable I am subscribed to through the dreambox so I can capture the mpeg streams for the few programs I watch nowdays but mainly I have to confess because of the novelty of the hack. I am just fascinated by the possibilities.

There is no way for me to get a genuine dreambox here, I have located a local source who will sell me one but I suspect it will be a chinese one for around 80 pounds. I know I have to get a Gemini image, 4.1 or 4.2 (4.3 will destroy the box apparently) and use some sort of combination of emulators and readers to read the irdeto card and descramble the digital channels.

Most of the folks here seem to have custom gemini images with known transponder ids and cable.xml files for UK which I will not have because this is in India, and a relatively new cable service. The only information I have is they are using irdeto zeta V5.3, the CAS card is type 0606, the physical card has a 11 digit number starting with 4026. I also suspect the box and card are paired. I also get these sets of information while surfing for different bouquets in the EPG for instance 434.0/6900 256QAM, 386.0/6900 64QAM, 418.0/6900 256QAM. I have tried to get the boxid but not succeeded so far.

The main problems I see is since this is a new service how do I find the channels without the cable.xml file. Second the Dizipia STB may be paired, I did see some card pairing information messing abut with the menus while looking for the boxid which I couldn't' find. And third will the dreambox accept the irdeto zeta card. Most of the forums I have read say that its possible with a combination of tools like emus but what about the keys that are regularly updated and available for instance for UK cable users online with 'toolbars' and such. (Do I have to use an emu if I don't want to cardshare and just use my physical valid card- can't I just slip it into the dreambox)

I would really appreciate any help from you guys in figuring out whether I will be able to use Dreambox 500c to receive the qam encrypted digital cable channels before I spend money getting the Dreambox and more time trying to make it work with the card.


Thanks a ton
Raul