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TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 05-06/2013
—
the stream will open fully au-
tomatically in the MX Player
after a few seconds of data
buffering.
A word of caution: In case
the video freezes at times or
does not play back smoothly
the hardware decoder might
be to blame in case it can-
not properly handle MPEG
streams. If this happens you
might want to turn off hard-
ware decoding in the MX Play-
er and try software decod-
ing. Even though you might
expect quite the contrary,
you should then be able to
enjoy smooth and high-qual-
ity video performance. How
come? The MX Player comes
with very good Codecs on the
software side and many cur-
12. If MX Player is not started
automatically by the IPTV app,
then you need to configure the
correct streaming player within
the IPTV app. Go to settings
and touch the “Streaming
player” option.
13. From the list select “MX
Player”. Naturally you can try
out the other installed players.
Anyway, we had the best
results with MX Player.
14. To zap, just touch the back
symbol or press the back
button, depending on your
Android device. Notice that the
Android menu bar appears due
to the screen shot functionality
used by us to grab the pictures.
In normal TV play, the image
fills the whole screen. If you
touch the screen, you will see
MX Player’s menu.
15. Of course you can access
both MX Player and IPTV as
any other app from the Android
user interface. They are fully
autonomous apps – we just did
not use them like that for this
application.
including VLC, we could only
ever play back the stream
with the MX Player). From now
on you can simply tap on any
TV icon on the screen. IPTV
will then launch automatically
with a link to the receiver’s IP
address. Tap on this link and
rent smartphones and tablets
feature processors that are
clocked at 1 GHz or above,
so that the processing power
of those devices is astonish-
ing. In our tests we were even
able to play back HD streams
flawlessly.
Another surprising obser-
vation we made during the
test was that we never expe-
rienced any dropouts, even
though our smartphone or
tablet was only connected via
WiFi to our local network. This
is one of the benefits of UNI-
CAST (see our feature series
on ‘Television from the Inter-
net’ for more details on IPTV,
multicast, unicast, etc.): As
the stream is only passed on
to a single receiver valuable
bandwidth is used extreme-
ly economically. The AZBox
ME/MiniMe in turn also only
streams out a single channel,
which means a reasonably
modern WiFi setup should
provide enough bandwidth.
Still, all that glitters is not
gold: The AZBox is only able
to stream to one device at a
time and the channel that is
streamed is the same that
is also sent to the TV panel.
In addition, the receiver will
automatically activate the
time-shift buffer. All things
considered, however, it could
still make sense to set up a
dedicated AZBox for each
member of the family. An
ever better solution could be
to use an AZBox ME acting
as a central PVR server and
feeding into individual AZBox
MiniMe clients for each family
member. This way each indi-
vidual can decide for them-
selves whether they want to
watch the selected channel
on the TV, smartphone or
tablet. Funnily enough, we
were caught more than once
choosing our tablet over the
TV. What’s more, these days
TV panels grow larger and
larger and if you want to go
for a smaller size TV a better
option might even be to get
an AZBox MiniMe plus an An-
droid tablet instead of a small
LCD panel. So times they are
a changing, and IPTV will gain
momentum – at least for pri-
vate use at home.
