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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 06-07-08/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
Multimedia with
the AZBox ME
Vitor Martins Augusto
FEATURE
AZBox ME Receiver Software
We already found out that
the AZBox ME thrills feed
hunters and DXers thanks to
its outstanding reception ca-
pabilities. Now we look at an-
other aspect and explain how
this receiver pleases mul-
timedia enthusiasts just as
well. No matter what popular
file format you throw at it,
the AZBox ME will happily ac-
cept films, music and photos.
The easiest way to enjoy
multimedia is to copy files to
the internal hard disk of the
AZBox ME using an FTP cli-
ent. Nothing wrong with that,
but these days there’s often
more than one TV in an av-
erage home and wouldn’t
it be nice to have access to
multimedia content from the
living room, study, bedroom
or any other place you use
for watching TV? In addition,
it doesn’t always make sense
to copy huge file loads to the
internal disk of the receiver.
There’s a convenient way
out: You can decide not to
store multimedia files locally
in the receiver or media play-
er itself, but rather create a
central server which hosts
your multimedia content. Any
Windows or Linux PC may be
used as server, or you can opt
for a ready-made Network
Area Storage (NAS) product,
preferably with Samba and
NFS compatibility.
No matter which option
you prefer, both feature
the Microsoft Windows Net-
work protocol that is recom-
mended for our setup. In
case Server Message Block
(SMB) or Common Internet
File System (CIFS) ring a bell
with you, these are the two
more commonly used names
for the Microsoft Windows
Network protocol. The Open
Source community has emu-
lated this protocol and dis-
tributes it under the name
Samba. For average users at
home this means that SMB,
CIFS and Samba are basi-
cally the same protocol and
will be supported by Windows
XP, Windows Vista and Win-
dows7.
Since the AZBox ME sup-
ports this protocol as well it
can be used to conveniently
access a central server and
obtain files for playback from
there. For that to work, how-
ever, it is necessary to create
a network share on the serv-
er so that clients are given