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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 02-03/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
Playing movies back from
a hard drive is all by itself a
beautiful thing, but it would
be far better to be able to
have direct access to our
multimedia server on which
can be found a nicely or-
ganized library of music,
pictures and movies. The
server allows via SAMBA free
access to this data.
We spent a few moments
with the AZBox‘s network
settings and were able to es-
tablish a connection rather
quickly. Instantly a new hard
drive appeared in the mul-
timedia player from which
we could access our server
through the network. We
tested a variety of media
types and confirmed to our
satisfaction that it was no
bother for the AZBox ME to
play back DivX data via the
network.
Another great feature is
the integrated YouTube cli-
ent. This lets you watch
YouTube videos through the
AZBox ME on your TV. The
text entry in the search field
with the keyboard was actu-
ally quite fast and it was fun
playing with this application.
The incredible assortment
of features in this receiver
can be even limitlessly ex-
panded with the installation
of Plugins. There are already
a number of Plugins avail-
able that can be directly
downloaded into the receiver
and, of course, Plugins can
be manually copied via FTP
to the AZBox ME and then
installed.
And just like with the first
image, we also opened the
Mozilla Firefox browser on
our PC in the Boot (1) image.
And just like before we were
able to access nearly all of
the AZBox ME‘s functions via
the web frontend although
it was a completely differ-
ent web frontend; one that
was suitable to the Boot (1)
image. There are so many
functions that you could use
that you‘ll always discover
something new. We were
able, for example, to take a
movie, that we earlier copied
to the receiver‘s hard drive
via FTP, and stream it to the
PC via VLC through the web
frontend.
Throughout the entire
test, during which the AZ-
Box ME was thoroughly put
through its paces, the re-
ceiver remained remarkably
cool even though there was
no cooling fan. Every other
Linux receiver that we know
of gets quite hot and even
puts out more heat in stand-
by mode than the AZBox ME
does in normal operational
mode. This guarantees that
the internal hard drive and
the electronics will have a
long and healthy life.