942 Mad Scientist First Look! 942 Innards.

[goaliebob99]

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Today I took apart my 942. For the greater good of you all Upon First look I noticed many things.. "OHhhh and Ahhh" I said to my self, as I opened the case. Upon opening up the case I noticed no pci slots on the mother board of the 942. Keep in mind I have had this 942 since day one of release and things may have changed on the mother board configuration. I do have a new 942 coming in as this one is dead and do plan on cracking that one open to see if anything has changed Upon first look inside the 942 there was no smart card inside witch leaves me to believe that the smart cards are ran via software embedded into the 942. That is a very good security feature and will help curb piracy. The 942 uses a BCM4500 Chip set for its dual tuners, with one chip per tuner. Looking at broadcoms web sight here is a bit more into this chip set.



The BCM4500 is a single chip digital satellite receiver supporting QPSK, 8PSK and 16QAM modulations with iteratively (turbo) decoded error correction coding. It represents an industry milestone in terms of satellite system throughput and operating points. The BCM4500 also receives DVB, DIRECTV and Digichiper II (DCII) QPSK signals to support legacy system operation.

The BCM4500 contains dual 7-bit A/D converters, an all-digital variable rate BPSK / QPSK / 8PSK / 16QAM receiver, an advanced modulation turbo FEC decoder, and a DVB / DIRECTV / DCII compliant FEC decoder. All required RAM is integrated and all required clocks are generated on chip from a single reference crystal. Baseband I/Q analog waveforms are sampled by the integrated 7-bit A/D converters, resampled by integrated interpolative digital filter banks, and filtered by dual square-root Nyquist filters. Optimized soft decisions are then fed into either a DVB / DIRECTV / DCII compliant FEC decoder, or an advanced modulation turbo decoder. The final error-corrected output is delivered in MPEG-2 or DIRECTV transport format. The output clock is generated by an on-chip PLL for low jitter operation and glueless integration with Broadcom's BCM7020 HD graphics and video subsystem.The BCM4500 contains a microcontroller which implements a high level language interface for easy host software development. It also contains an integrated DiSEqCTM controller for two way communication with LNB.


SOURCE

This chip set can do digicipher II. This leaves that option open for dish security wise.

Looking into these chip sets it became apparent that this 942 can not do mpeg 4. This receiver would need to go back to the factory and have these chips replaced. The 942 Also uses another bradcom chip set as its main CPU GUI. That chip set is the Broadcom BCM7038. Here is a look at that chipset from broadcoms web sight


BCM7038
Dual High-Definition Digital Video System-on-Chip Solution for Cable, Satellite, and DTV
The BCM7038 is an advanced dual channel HD video/audio/graphics and personal video recording (PVR) chip that enables manufacturers to economically incorporate high-quality HDTV capability and PVR features into digital televisions, cable set-top boxes, satellite receivers and HD-DVD players. The chip's dual video/audio channels simultaneously support dual televisions, with independent picture-in-picture support on main and secondary. Advanced video and graphics features, such as on-chip 3D Y/C separation circuit multi-frame de-interlacing, and quad video scalars with single pass processing, significantly improve the HD picture quality, by removing unwanted noise and artifacts from the television image. The chip supports common PVR functions such as pausing live programming, recording, and forwarding and reversing through recorded programs, as well as incorporates software drivers to support industry standard PVR platforms, including TiVo® and XTV™.

The BCM7038 incorporates a 300 MHz 64-bit MIPS® CPU, along with floating point processor, which has a very fast path o 400 MHz DDR system memory to support the high-performance needs required by advanced applications. Numerous other cost saving features have been incorporated into the chip, enabling manufacturers to be more competitive in the HD market.

Source

Where have we seen XTV before?? It made me think... humm two different company's or is it a conspiracy I was also quite surprised at the fact that the hard drive uses SATA instead of IDE. This is a nice feature. Also it was quite apparent that dish does not want the hard drive to be mess with as there is a void warranty sticker if removed. I didn't want to mess with the hard drive to see how big it really is as this 942 has a date with dish One bad feature of the 942 is the Remote Anntena tuner. There was Nothing holding it up and could vary easily be broken if the 942 was somehow dropped during shipment. Over all the 942 looks well constructed and everything is well placed to disperse heat properly. I did not notice a fan on the 942 either. Here you all go this is what it looks like

[SatinKzo]

What? no pics?

[goaliebob99]

whoah... they were uploaded..

[goaliebob99]

Let see if this works.. .. yep they do ENJOY

[SatinKzo]

Wooo hooo. Thanks for the info and the pics.

[SummitAdvantageRetailer]

Originally Posted by goaliebob99

Today I took apart my 942. For the greater good of you all Upon First look I noticed many things.. "OHhhh and Ahhh" I said to my self, as I opened the case. Upon opening up the case I noticed no pci slots on the mother board of the 942. Keep in mind I have had this 942 since day one of release and things may have changed on the mother board configuration. I do have a new 942 coming in as this one is dead and do plan on cracking that one open to see if anything has changed Upon first look inside the 942 there was no smart card inside witch leaves me to believe that the smart cards are ran via software embedded into the 942. That is a very good security feature and will help curb piracy. The 942 uses a BCM4500 Chip set for its dual tuners, with one chip per tuner. Looking at broadcoms web sight here is a bit more into this chip set.



The BCM4500 is a single chip digital satellite receiver supporting QPSK, 8PSK and 16QAM modulations with iteratively (turbo) decoded error correction coding. It represents an industry milestone in terms of satellite system throughput and operating points. The BCM4500 also receives DVB, DIRECTV and Digichiper II (DCII) QPSK signals to support legacy system operation.

The BCM4500 contains dual 7-bit A/D converters, an all-digital variable rate BPSK / QPSK / 8PSK / 16QAM receiver, an advanced modulation turbo FEC decoder, and a DVB / DIRECTV / DCII compliant FEC decoder. All required RAM is integrated and all required clocks are generated on chip from a single reference crystal. Baseband I/Q analog waveforms are sampled by the integrated 7-bit A/D converters, resampled by integrated interpolative digital filter banks, and filtered by dual square-root Nyquist filters. Optimized soft decisions are then fed into either a DVB / DIRECTV / DCII compliant FEC decoder, or an advanced modulation turbo decoder. The final error-corrected output is delivered in MPEG-2 or DIRECTV transport format. The output clock is generated by an on-chip PLL for low jitter operation and glueless integration with Broadcom's BCM7020 HD graphics and video subsystem.The BCM4500 contains a microcontroller which implements a high level language interface for easy host software development. It also contains an integrated DiSEqCTM controller for two way communication with LNB.


SOURCE

This chip set can do digicipher II. This leaves that option open for dish security wise.

Looking into these chip sets it became apparent that this 942 can not do mpeg 4. This receiver would need to go back to the factory and have these chips replaced. The 942 Also uses another bradcom chip set as its main CPU GUI. That chip set is the Broadcom BCM7038. Here is a look at that chipset from broadcoms web sight


BCM7038
Dual High-Definition Digital Video System-on-Chip Solution for Cable, Satellite, and DTV
The BCM7038 is an advanced dual channel HD video/audio/graphics and personal video recording (PVR) chip that enables manufacturers to economically incorporate high-quality HDTV capability and PVR features into digital televisions, cable set-top boxes, satellite receivers and HD-DVD players. The chip's dual video/audio channels simultaneously support dual televisions, with independent picture-in-picture support on main and secondary. Advanced video and graphics features, such as on-chip 3D Y/C separation circuit multi-frame de-interlacing, and quad video scalars with single pass processing, significantly improve the HD picture quality, by removing unwanted noise and artifacts from the television image. The chip supports common PVR functions such as pausing live programming, recording, and forwarding and reversing through recorded programs, as well as incorporates software drivers to support industry standard PVR platforms, including TiVo® and XTV™.

The BCM7038 incorporates a 300 MHz 64-bit MIPS® CPU, along with floating point processor, which has a very fast path o 400 MHz DDR system memory to support the high-performance needs required by advanced applications. Numerous other cost saving features have been incorporated into the chip, enabling manufacturers to be more competitive in the HD market.

Source

Where have we seen XTV before?? It made me think... humm two different company's or is it a conspiracy I was also quite surprised at the fact that the hard drive uses SATA instead of IDE. This is a nice feature. Also it was quite apparent that dish does not want the hard drive to be mess with as there is a void warranty sticker if removed. I didn't want to mess with the hard drive to see how big it really is as this 942 has a date with dish One bad feature of the 942 is the VSB tuner for OTA reception. There was Nothing holding it up and could vary easily be broken if the 942 was somehow dropped during shipment. Over all the 942 looks well constructed and everything is well placed to disperse heat properly. I did not notice a fan on the 942 either. Here you all go this is what it looks like

They must've taken all the problems of the 921 and fixed it with the 942. The 921 has that fan noise that some of us don't appreciate much. Plus, those chips sound pretty nice in features. Thanks for opening it up for us.

[digiblur]

There's a smart card there. It's just in another form factor than what you are used to.

[HokieEngineer]

Okay, so the 411 and 942 use the same main broadcom cpu. The 7038. See this picture for the innards of the 411 at team summit.

http://www.satelliteguys.us/attachme...9&d=1114827012

However, the 411 has an additional chip, the 7411, which handles the AVC codec stuff. I'm assuming they came up with a new revision of the 942 mainboard which incorporates this chip. Thus all they will have to do is swap mainboards, and leave the HD and everything else the same. Who knows how much that'll cost though.

BTW, AVC = h.264, which is what dish and everyone else calls mpeg4.

[Sean Mota]

Did you have to break the warranty seal to open it?

[Scott Greczkowski]

Nope the only seal is the one holding the hard drive enclosure which prevents you from swapping out the hard drive.