TL;DR:

This document introduces a product which I designed/developed, with following rough specifications:

• CelestialSemi CSM1203 ARM CPU @180Mhz
• 256Mbyte DDR1 RAM
• 32Mbyte NOR Flash
• Built-in Power Supply
• Ethernet networking capabilities
• Custom minimal Linux
• DVB-S / DVB-S2 HD Set-Top-Box
• CA Card Reader
• Common Interface (CI) Slot
• SDL based UI 
• Web Interface, FTP, SSH, IPTV Streaming… many more

Figure 1 Hiremco Chipbox

Introduction

HIREMCO Chipbox was 1st Linux DVB Set-Top-Box designed / developed / manufactured in Turkey. It is also one of the first STB’s in the world market, after Dreambox/Vu+, which uses embedded Linux .

Figure 2 Typical Infrastructure for STB connection in an Apartment/Residence

Using embedded Linux in a DVB set-top-box provided many opportunities compared to proprietary STB solutions, since it allowed us to re-use many software which needed to be ported, only cross-compiling was enough.

Implementation

In order to comply with requirements, we decided to use CelestialSemi CSM1203 SoC which support Linux as well as DVB Transport Stream Hardware Accelerated Demultiplexing/Decoding.

You can see photos below for the final product: