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TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 06-07-08/2012
— www.TELE-satellite.com
how receivers we review deal
with different material.
Our first task for the AZBox
ME media player was the in-
famous movie ‘Planet 9 from
Outer Space’. Directed by
Edward Wood this film is re-
garded by many as the worst
of its kind ever. Interestingly
enough, it is that bad reputa-
tion that has helped it gain so
much dubious fame. Our ver-
sion was an mp4 file made up
of H264 – MPEG4 AVC video
with a resolution of 640 x 480
pixels and MPEG AAC audio
with 48kHz stereo.
The AZBox ME seemed
to be perfectly happy with
those technical specs and so
we decided to while away for
an hour or two and ‘enjoy’
what is judged the worst film
in motion picture history. In
case you care about our final
verdict: We’ve already seen
worse than that…
Next up was ‘Captain Kidd’
from the year 1954. The ver-
sion we downloaded came in
an AVI container consisting
of MPEG4 (XVID) video and
MPEG3 audio. Once again, we
could watch the film without
any flaws or glitches.
We even discovered and
downloaded a subtitle file
for ‘Captain Kidd’, which only
needed to be saved with the
same file name as the movie
plus *.srt extension. When
you watch the film the SUBT
button on the remote will call
up and/or cancel the subti-
tles on screen. We loved that
size, appearance, positioning
and even colour of the sub-
titles can be customised ac-
cording to your preferences.
In case audio and subtitles
are not in sync it is possible
to increase or decrease the
delay factor.
It is unbelievably conveni-
ent to (legally) download a
film to the PC, copy it into a
directory and have it availa-
ble for all media clients within
the network. That’s exactly
how a media player should
work and it’s how the AZBox
ME actually does work. Mis-
sion completed. Period.
Let’s turn to audio now.
You can either choose to play
all audio files in the direc-
tory or create a playlist and
compile individual songs from
the directory. In general, we
always prefer a directory-
based mp3 organisation be-
cause this does not restrict
you to proprietary media
software. To put it short: No
complaints as far as audio is
concerned.
One piece of advice for us-
ers: You should make a point
of using the optical audio
output for maximum listen-
ing pleasure. After all, that’s
exactly what it’s here for.
And finally, one request to
the manufacturer: It would
be nice if playlists could be
saved and loaded again at a
later time.
To finish things off we
looked at how images and
photos that are stored on the
server can be shown with the
AZBox ME media player. We
expected a standard slide-
show but soon became all
the wiser: It’s possible to
create thumbnails of all pic-
tures which are freely scal-
able in size, the background
colour can be changed and
file details can be displayed if
desired. Thanks to the HDMI
output the sharpness of the
pictures on screen is noth-
ing short of impressive and if
the AZBox ME is matched to
a 1080i/p panel the outcome
is high-definition in the most
literal sense.
To sum up, the AZBox ME’s
multimedia capabilities leave
nothing to be desired and
even surpassed our high ex-
pectations. Once again, we
want to stress that this re-
view specifically focuses on
the media player of the re-
ceiver and how it can be set
up to access files that are lo-
cated on a server. All of the
above will of course work just
as nicely with content stored
on an internal or external
hard disk or an attached USB
storage medium.
As far as we are concerned,
we’ll quickly wrap up this re-
port and then head home
to set up our own media
network with an AZBox ME
hooked to every TV…
14-21. Video
22-24. Music
25-28. Images