feature azbox me receiver software -...

84 85TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 06-07-08/2012 — TELE-satellite International — 全球发行量最大的数字电视杂志

Revealing the Secrets of the AZBox ME Super Box

Part 2: Multimedia

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FEATURE AZBox ME Receiver Software

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Multimedia with the AZBox MEVitor 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

permission to access certain directories and files on the server.

As you will see from our ex-ample, the AZBox ME should be granted access to a certain directory on our Windows7 computer. We named that specific directory ‘Multime-dia’ and created three subdi-rectories within the ‘Multime-dia’ directory, namely:

• ‘Video’ for video files• ‘Audio’ for audio files• ‘Images’ for pictures It is best to set up Win-

dows7 in a way that allows manual configuration of net-work shares. This is the only way to quickly determine whether read, write and read/write permissions are to be granted for files within a net-work share. We recommend read-only permission for all types of media clients – this way you can happily give the remote to your kids or techni-cally challenged members of your family without having to fear your precious files might inadvertently get deleted by the end of the day.

Next, a user account has to be created for network access. Depending on your personal requirements or preferences you may choose to create either one general account for all media clients, or an individual account for each specific client. Both op-tions come with certain ad-vantages and drawbacks:

• One account for all me-dia clients: You might like the fact that you’re ready to go in a flash since only one account has to be set up. Please note, however, that this means all clients have permission to access the same directories and files.

• An individual account for each media client: This in-volves a little more work in the beginning, but you are then able to make sure your kids can only watch and lis-ten to content that is located in a specific directory, for ex-ample.

No matter how you man-age access to content, you need to specify a password in any case because Windows7

only permits network access through password-protected accounts.

Finally, the selected direc-tory (which in our case is the directory with the name ‘Mul-timedia’) has to be flagged as a network share directory. Simply mark the directory and call up the context menu with a right mouse click. Se-

lect the ‘Network share’ op-tion and specify a name such as ‘multimedia’ for the share. If you have created more than one account you can also define which accounts should be given access per-mission to this specific net-work share.

Now it’s time to focus on the AZBox ME and set it up as a media client with access to the network share. If all goes according to plan the directo-ry of the Windows7 computer will appear as a separate en-try in the AZBox ME’s own file system.

Go to the ‘Setup’ menu (image 1) and select the ‘System’ option, followed by the ‘Network’ option (image 2). In the network configu-ration menu choose ‘Mount-Manager’ (image 3) in order to access the ‘Auto Mount Manager’ (image 4). You need to create a new net-work connection and to this end you have to use the first option which is called ‘Add new network mount point’.

Take your time now to en-ter all information precisely

as required (image 5):• Local share name: Spec-

ify a name for the network directory – this is how it will appear in the media player’s

file system. You may want to use ‘mediaserver’ or ‘com-puter’, for example.

• Mount Type: If the SMB/CIFS/Samba protocol is used

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88 TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 06-07-08/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com

low connections using 128bit encryption by default and this (as well as most other issues) has to be addressed in Windows System Control. We set up network shares for our AZBox ME on a number of different computers with var-ying degrees of success. On some machines everything worked brilliantly right away, while on others we had to dig into the network options.

If you’re more of an in-stant gratification type we recommend you use a PC with Windows XP. This op-erating system comes with much fewer security restric-tions and you’ll be able to set it up as a content server for the AZBox ME almost in an instant. Don’t blame Micro-soft for increased protection of its more recent operating systems, though: It merely reflects today’s demands in terms of access protection and data security.

As soon as you can see a clear hard disk symbol on your screen (image 9) you know your network configu-ration has been successful and your AZBox ME can be used as a media client.

From now on the AZBox ME media center will automati-cally show a new directory whose content is actually on the server. Everything you move or copy into this direc-tory – no matter whether it’s files or new subdirectories with films, music or photos – will be available on the AZBox ME and can be played back on the TV.

You might ask yourself at this stage where legal con-tent comes from? Quite sim-ply, from www.archive.org. On this portal you can find 100% legal content such as movies, music and even books whose copyright pro-tection has expired. Newer content is available as well, provided free of charge from some authors.

We use the portal on a regular basis to download all sorts of films and videos that are compressed with dif-ferent codecs so that we can find out in our test center

(as in our case), select ‘CIFS share’.

• Server IP: Enter the cor-rect IP address of the server here. You can find that ad-dress in the server’s network configuration. A word of cau-tion: In case your server ob-tains its IP address from the router via DHCP you should make sure the server is al-ways assigned the same IP address!

• Server share: Enter the name of the network share, in our example it is ‘multime-dia’.

• Use as HDD replacement: If your AZBox ME is equipped with an internal hard disk it is best to select ‘no’. If you choose ‘yes’ you may use your network connection as a kind of virtual hard disk for recordings.

• Mount options: We have already defined read/write permission when setting up the network share on the server, so it is best to leave this option as ‘rw’.

• Username: Enter the name of the account that you have set up on the server.

• Password: Enter the password for the correspond-ing account.

If you are then asked whether or not to save that configuration you should of course confirm with ‘yes’, un-less you want to discard all settings you just made (im-age 6).

After a screen asking you to wait for a few seconds (im-age 7) you should see a re-freshed list with all network directories. Please make sure the hard disk icon to the left does not have a red cross (image 8), since this would indicate a problem with the network share. If you’re faced with such a situation we rec-ommend a thorough Google search for ‘windows7 samba problem’ which should pro-vide valuable assistance. Un-fortunately, there are numer-ous different causes for failed network access – in many cases Windows7 will only al-

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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…

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