I've bought a dreambox 500, which is one of the smallest model they make, but I only want to use it to stream content from my pc to the tv.

When you start streaming there is almost always not right with the video stream... its is not encoded in mpeg2 which means the dm500 can't show it, or if it is in the right format there is something wrong with the aspect ratio.

So enter mencoder, which can be used for all kinds of transcoding. I wanted to convert avi files to mpeg2 (or DVD format) for showing on the dm. I'm now using the following shell script:

1 int main(int c) {
2     printf("This is nice");
3     exit(1);
4 }

Where you give it basename of the file you want to convert.

I also needed to a presize filter to make the video appear in the correct size on the tv screen, so the scale=presize=pal filter is needed in this case.