The third possibility would be to design a simple network hardware, and implement all the access exclusion logic in a server process running on a networked Linux box. I.e. while the hardware directly broadcasts the video streams, all control messages (i.e. channel requests etc.) have to go through a single server process. Why? Because it keeps the hardware simple, and writing and updating software for a full PC operating system is much easier than for an embedded CPU, and you can do more (eg. gather EPG data not just from the transmitted data, but also from the internet, etc.) Your full proper network receiver would IMO be 3dB more expensive for the hardware and the software effort would also be at least 3dB more time... Tom
