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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 02-03/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
this type of transmission.
But this makes the AZBox ME
amazing in that it can play
back this format without any
lag! This fact alone would be
a great selling point in feed
hunter circles.
To test it we found sev-
eral transponders with MPEG
4:2:2 feeds. We had luck
with the first transponder
and were able to watch a
live broadcast. To verify that
this was indeed a transmis-
sion with MPEG compres-
sion in 4:2:2, we recorded
the transponder stream (TS)
and copied it to our PC us-
ing FTP. The Open Source
tool „Mediainfo“ (mediainfo.
sourceforge.net/en) offers
the necessary assistance in
that in addition to the Codec,
the Chrome Profile is also
shown.
Feedhunters love to use a
function called BlindScan in
which the entire frequency
range of an LNB is scanned
in a very short time for ac-
tive transponders without
having to enter in additional
parameters such as symbol
rate or FEC.
Although the AZBox ME
currently doesn‘t have a
BlindScan feature, the addi-
tion of this function has been
promised for one of the next
firmware versions. The most
critical component is already
in place: a BlindScan-com-
patible tuner!
To see how well the AZ-
Box ME works with motor-
ized antennas, we hooked up
the receiver to our 1.0-me-
ter offset antenna with DiS-
EqC 1.2 motor. We asked
the receiver to perform an
automatic channel scan on
14 different satellites. Since
this task would take some
time, we let the receiver run
overnight.
We woke up the next
morning anxious to see if the
receiver was successfully
able to handle the job or if
it crashed, something that
happens all too often with
other receivers.
To our relief we found that
the receiver was still running
and that it had found a total
of 6136 services (TV, radio
and data). This was impres-
sive especially because a
storm passed through dur-
ing the test that knocked our
antenna slightly out of align-
ment and therefore was no
longer optimally aligned.
Instead of trying to per-
fectly realign the antenna,
which was not possible be-
cause of the ongoing storm,
we turned the antenna to
space so that an acceptable
picture can be displayed
even after it has been edited
several times over.
Standard receivers can‘t
do anything with this format
and therefore can‘t display
ASTRA 2D to see if we could
receive BBC HD. Well, how
about that! The tuner, de-
spite a small antenna, a
misaligned motor and bad
weather was able to receive
the problem transponder 50
(10847 V 23000, 8/9) on AS-
TRA 2D and display it with-
out any interference.
Additional traits of a good
tuner include the ability to
receive small symbol rates
and also to display a pic-
ture even if the signal is
weak. With that in mind we
turned our dish to TELSTAR
12 at 15W and called up the
11566H transponder. This
uses a symbol rate/FEC of
5625 ½. BYU TV was dis-
played without any hesita-
tion worth mentioning.
We also attempted the
Russian INTER+ channel on
the same satellite that was
broadcasting on 10988H
with a symbol rate/FEC of
2180 ¾. This transponder
had already been found dur-
ing our overnight channel
scan.
Thus far we‘ve been very
impressed with the capabili-
ties of this receiver but we
still hadn‘t checked out the
multimedia side of this box.
So, we decided to copy a
number of movies from the
AVI container via FTP onto
the receiver‘s hard drive and
in a second test we connect-
ed an external USB 2.0 hard
drive that contained multi-
media content.
All of the movies were
played back without any
problems; even DivX coded
movies were handled without
any difficulties. We weren‘t,
however, able to display sub-
titles in SRT format; but this
is normal: we don‘t know of
any receiver that can do this.
The AZBox ME surprised us
once again when we inadver-
tently tried to open an AVI
file that originated from our
Fuji S9000 camera. These
videos normally can only be
opened under Windows and
quite often a Codec from the
camera manufacturer would
also have to be installed. Be-
fore we realized what we had
done, the receiver played
the video back without any
difficulties at all.