The Dreambox is a Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television decoder (set-top box), produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia.
Its firmware is officially user-upgradable, since it is a Linux-based computer, as opposed to third-party patching of alternate receivers.
All units support Dream's own DreamCrypt conditional access (CA) system, with software-emulated CA Modules (CAMs) available for many alternate CA systems.
The Dreambox is based on the DBox2 units that were distributed by Kirch Media for its pay-TVEthernet interface allows networked computers to access the recordings on the internal hard disks on some Dreambox models.
It also enables the receiver to store digital copies of DVB transport streams on networked filesystems or broadcast the streams as IPTV to VideoLAN clients.
Unlike many PC based PVR systems that use free-to-air type of DVB receiver cards, the built-in conditional access allows receiving and storing encrypted content. services before its bankruptcy; it uses the same Linux-based software originally developed for the DBox2. The built-in conditional access allows receiving and storing encrypted content.
