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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 02-03/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
7. Channel Scan
8. The Tivizen App can be
used with the iPad in either
horizontal or vertical modes.
9. DVB-T playback
of the current and upcom-
ing programs for each of
the channels; of course,
this would only be possible
if this information is made
available by the provider.
After briefly pressing the
desired channel the App
begins playing it back after
a short delay of about four
seconds. A detailed Info bar
is blended in at the bottom
of the screen that contains
current EPG information for
the current and upcoming
programs as well as a pair
of bar graphs that show the
signal strength of the cur-
rent DVB-T channel as well
as the battery level of the
Tivizen. If you tap your fin-
ger anywhere in the vicinity
of the TV signal, a control
screen is displayed that can
be used to either stop or re-
cord the current channel.
If you’re scratching your
head right now, let us ex-
plain: the Tivizen App can
store the currently running
program in the internal
memory of the iPhone, iPad
or iPod Touch. There’s even
a Time Shift function avail-
able as well as fast-forward
and rewind functions. It
makes sense now why the
App’s Main Menu included a
Recordings button in addi-
tion to Live TV and Settings
buttons. The Recordings
button let’s you play back
previously stored content.
Since the Tivizen App uses
the widely distributed MPEG
format for recordings, there
is nearly an unlimited num-
ber of editing tools available
for you to use. As you can
see, the Tivizen in connec-
tion with an iPhone, iPad
or iPod Touch gives you a
complete DVB-T receiver in-
cluding PVR which you can
just carry around in your
pocket!
The manufacturer even
included the ability to con-
tinue to play the audio of
the current channel in the
background if the user
should start another App in
the foreground. This is one
way to pass the time dur-
ing those long commercial
breaks. Once the interrup-
tion is over, the user simply
needs to double-push the
Home button to jump right
back in to watching DVB-T
TV.
The Tivizen ran effort-
lessly throughout our entire
testing process; there were
no crashes or other errors
to be seen. TV playback
flowed smoothly without
any pixilation or other inter-
ference in the picture and
that’s not surprising at all
considering that the Tivizen
uses a powerful ARM 9 RISC
processor. We were a little
disappointed to find out
that the Tivizen in connec-
tion with the iPhone, iPad
or iPod Touch does not sup-
port HD content in MPEG-4
or H.264 via DVB-T; even
DVB-T2 is not supported.
On the reception side of
things, the Tivizen covers
the entire VHF and UHF fre-
quency ranges, that is, from
177.5 to 226.5 MHz (VHF)
and 474 to 858 MHz (UHF).
The COFDM demodulator
supports 16 QAM, 64 QAM
and QPSK with bandwidths
of 6, 7 and 8 MHz. The in-
tegrated telescopic antenna
works quite well and eas-
ily measures up to active
DVB-T room antennas. To
test its capabilities, we at-
tempted to latch onto the
DVB-T channels from The
Czech Republic. We were
located about 40km from
the border and as you can
see by the screenshots that
accompany this test report,
we managed to accomplish
this without any problems
at all.
Since we are dealing
with a universal App for
the iPhone, iPad and iPod
Touch, it needs to be down-
loaded only once; it can
then be used on all three
of these devices. We also