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Erfurt
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TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 01-02/2014
—
The Specialists
for TV Reception
on a PC
One of the most well-known software
programs for reception of digital chan-
nels on a computer is DVBViewer. This
program is so popular because most digi-
tal TV PC card manufacturers include this
software with their products; this has al-
lowed DVBViewer to become the market
leader. So, who‘s actually behind this suc-
cess story? Who better to explain all this
to us than the programmers themselves:
the father and son team Hackbart. We
met up with them in Erfurt, Germany.
The son, Christian Hackbart, was DVB-
Viewer‘s programmer. „When I was eight
years old I was given a Sinclair Spectrum
Computer from a relative.“ That was
1986. From that point on little Christian
set out to discover all the secrets of this
new and wonderful technology. His father
Bernd Hackbart recalls: „Christian was
very proud to show me his first piece of
programming - graphically created peo-
ple strolling across the monitor.“
It was not surprising that Christian
went on to study electronics later on at
the Ilmenau Technical University. During
his studies he programmed a spectrum
emulator. „In 2000 I came in contact with
programmers out of Bratislava and to-
gether we worked on developing a video
player based on DirectShow.“
Christain Hackbart was able to take the
experience that he gained from this and
expand on it shortly thereafter. „There
was an Internet-via-Satellite service that
ceased operations in 2002. All of a sud-
den there were a large number of PC
cards that no longer had any use. They
could be purchased very cheaply.“ Chris-
tian Hackbart jumped on this opportunity
and educated himself on satellite data
streams with the help of these PC cards.
Because of his previous experience, he
found it easy to write a software program
that filtered TV channels out of this data
stream and then program a user inter-
face. „In just a few weeks I had written
the first version of DVBViewer“, recalls
Christian Hackbart. His father Bernd
Hackbart adds, „That was in the spring of
SatIP Viewer for MAC
Screenshots of the brand new SatIP Viewer for MAC. For now the SatIP Viewer
only comes bundled with the Windows version of DVBViewer. A MAC version is in
the works. Here are screenshots of the Beta version.
COMPANY REPORT
PC Card Software
