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Thomas Haring
TELE-satellite
Test Center
Austria
60
TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 06-07-08/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
Feature-packed receiver made up of top-notch
hardware and excellent software. Despite its
enormous range of features it remains easy
to use and can be recommended to satellite
enthusiasts and beginners alike. Thanks to its
three tuners it is possible to receive DVB-S2,
DVB-T, DVB-C and Internet TV, which means
a single box can deal with all available trans-
mission modes.
Unfortunately, DVB-T2 is not supported
Expert Opinion
their own apps and are
available for download from
the Spark portal, which in-
cidentally can be launched
with a dedicated button on
the remote control.
It‘s quite striking that the
Spark App Store currently
features a large number
of German-language apps,
but we expect the number
of languages and regions to
increase rapidly in future.
If you‘re interested in a
specific language only, you
may use the correspond-
ing filter in the Spark App
Store, which can restrict the
offering to English, German,
Hungarian, Polish, Dutch or
Arabic.
Even though it is a work
in progress and therefore
not yet fully implemented,
we’d like to mention the
web server that comes with
the Amiko Alien 2. Once
completed, it will allow re-
mote access and control of
the receiver from any web
browser.
No matter where in the
world you are, you‘ll be able
to fully control the receiver,
with the range of options
covering everything from
video resolution to PVR set-
tings. It is also possible to
look at status information
or to initiate a re-start.
Before you‘ll be able to
use remote access you have
to define a user name and
password in the receiver
menu, which then has to be
entered in order to gain ac-
cess to the receiver.
As the web server will
only be released some time
in the future, its features
are currently not active by
default.
Right at the beginning of
this review we mentioned
that the Amiko Alien 2 does
not care which transmission
mode is used to feed it with
TV and radio content.
Apart from the two DVB-
S2 tuners and the DVB-T/C
tuner it can even receive TV
via Internet, which is hidden
in the ‚Web TV‘ menu item.
Generally speaking, this is
a selection of TV and radio
content that is freely avail-
able on the Internet, with all
links saved in a dedicated
xml file.
If you want to use the web
TV function, this means you
absolutely need such an
xml file. Thankfully, a quick
search o the Internet re-
veals a number of such lists
and our thanks go out to
eager users compiling and
updating those lists in their
leisure time.
We obtained one list for
testing purposes, which in-
cluded an impressive va-
riety of different genres,
ranging from wrestling and
music channels all the way
to a 3D and HD channel, plus
a number of radio stations.
Stay tuned for a compre-
hensive review of the Spark
software‘s web TV functions
in one of the upcoming is-
sues of TELE-satellite.
From the sheer length of
this report and from our en-
thusiasm you can tell that
the Amiko Alien 2 is filled to
the brim with more features
than you would ever expect.
What‘s more, each feature
we tapped into worked flaw-