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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 02-03/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
integrated. We quickly be-
came acclimated to the EPG
and the Videotext feature
also functioned lightning
fast with its unlimited page
memory. It‘s curious though:
while watching a channel, a
push of the red button dis-
plays a small „Event List“
menu from which EPG infor-
mation can be accessed. A
fourth menu point is labeled
„Technical Information“ and
makes it possible to display a
variety of relevant informa-
tion on the currently running
program. All the PIDs are
shown as is information on
resolution and reception plus
there‘s a black box on the
right side that is supposed to
display a graphic with BER,
SNR, signal and bitrate. Al-
though these values are
also shown numerically, the
graphic was not displayed.
Hopefully this will be cor-
rected in a future version of
the firmware; a satellite DX-
ers heart beats faster with
this kind of information and
if it‘s displayed graphically,
it then makes it possible to
observe this data over time.
We entered the IP address
of the AZBox ME into the PCs
Mozilla Firefox browser to
test if it would be presented
in the web frontend. And
sure enough, a page was
opened with an abundance
of functions.
You can access the EPG
information for all channels,
switch between channels
and stream them into the
browser and display them
using the browser‘s VLC
plug-in.
You don‘t have to sit in
front of the TV; you can ac-
cess the receiver through
the network. You can also
completely configure the
AZBox ME through the web
frontend, set up timer re-
cordings - you can even call
up a virtual remote control.
It‘s unbelievable how far the
integration between the re-
ceiver and browser has gone.
After spending some time
with this image, our curiosity
got the better of us and we
couldn‘t wait any longer; we
had to try the image at „Boot
(1)“. To accomplish this we
had to perform a reset and
then while restarting the re-
ceiver we had to hold down
the „1“ button on the remote
control until the receiver
confirmed our selection. The
receiver‘s boot loader recog-
nizes the last selected image
and boots it automatically so
that when switching images
the user simply needs to se-
lect 0, 1 or 2 during the boot
process.
A totally different greet-
ing image appeared and
after only a short loading
time we could clearly see
that a completely different
user interface was loaded.
Even though the skin of the
interface was adapted to
the AZBox ME, we instantly
recognized one of the most
popular operating systems
of Linux satellite receivers.
As before, an assistant
once again guided us through
the initial setup. In the first
step the video output and
resolution are selected.
Next the user selects from
a list of many different lan-
guages whereby a small flag
is shown next to the lan-
guage name. It‘s a small but
useful element if you can‘t
read the English spelling of
each language.
After a short introduc-
tion to navigating with the
remote control, the next
step was the configura-
tion of the tuner. You can
choose between a simplified
automatic configuration or
an expanded configuration
for more complex satel-
lite systems. We opted with
the simple configuration for
DiSEqC 1.0 with four inputs
(A, B, C and D).
The last step was starting
an automatic channel scan.
After just a few minutes it
was complete and we could