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Scott Greczkowski said:

Personally I think Rick has just as much right to change his companies name to Azbox USA.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

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Even if he would do this, it would serve no purpose. Rick has not invested a single penny in firmware development for the North American market and is hoping that the third party European firmware developers will fix all the bugs which are specific to this market. However, this is almost impossible to do as they can't receive our satellites and over in the European market, they are more focused on using these receivers for viewing subscription services either with a subscribed smart card or via illegal Internet sharing.

If it wasn't for us, the AzBox Me that he used to sell would have no ability to support such things as:

- Blindscan on systems using anything other than an universal LNBF (i.e. C-band or standard 10750)
- Manual PID entry
- Wireless networking support via USB adapter
- Default video settings to NTSC after a factory reset
- Default North American satellite list

Furthermore, it is a known fact that along with the European firmware, he was also pre-installing our firmware as well on the AzBox Me receivers he was selling. I'm 100% certain that if it wasn't for our firmware, he would have not sold out of his AzBox Me's yet at this time so the guy should be grateful for our investment in AzBox software development for the North American market. Sadly, it appears that he does not care at all for the long term quality of AzBox products in the North American market but rather just for his sales.


Best regards,

PwrSurge
AzBox Canada & US

pwrsurge said:

Even if he would do this, it would serve no purpose. Rick has not invested a single penny in firmware development for the North American market and is hoping that the third party European firmware developers will fix all the bugs which are specific to this market. However, this is almost impossible to do as they can't receive our satellites and over in the European market, they are more focused on using these receivers for viewing subscription services either with a subscribed smart card or via illegal Internet sharing.

If it wasn't for us, the AzBox Me that he used to sell would have no ability to support such things as:

- Blindscan on systems using anything other than an universal LNBF (i.e. C-band or standard 10750)
- Manual PID entry
- Wireless networking support via USB adapter
- Default video settings to NTSC after a factory reset
- Default North American satellite list

Furthermore, it is a known fact that along with the European firmware, he was also pre-installing our firmware as well on the AzBox Me receivers he was selling. I'm 100% certain that if it wasn't for our firmware, he would have not sold out of his AzBox Me's yet at this time so the guy should be grateful for our investment in AzBox software development for the North American market. Sadly, it appears that he does not care at all for the long term quality of AzBox products in the North American market but rather just for his sales.


Best regards,

PwrSurge
AzBox Canada & US

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I hope you didnt invest much, if thats all the changes youve done then what youve accomplished is trivial. You could have just used OpenPLi and got the same things, open source does wonders.

If you goto apple.ca you expect its apple, if you goto dell.ca you expect its dell, if you goto azbox.ca youd be mistaken in thinking is azbox's website, its only a dealer, not azbox themselves. You may not have ever stated that you were azbox, but youve implied it many times in how you refer to your company. Your mearly a dealer that has modified some trivial things in the firmware. None of what you listed is rocket science.

Your empty hopes about 4:2:2 is misleading as well. either the hardware supports it or it doesnt, no amount of hope can change whats inside the box. Have you seen the hardware yourself ? no ? you really shouldnt be filling consumers heads with unfounded hope about something you know nothing about. That's plain irresponsible.

Stop complaining about how much money youve sunk into a now defunct product and how no one else is paying anything to develop it when that was a personal decision only you should bear. It was your decision not anyone else's. Ive spent my own money to buy hardware just to develop drivers and software for devices, you dont see me complaining that I had to buy a $150 logic analyser just so that I could reverse engineer some closed source drivers do you? Did I have todo that? no. Its my own personal decision. Or what about the fact Prof tuners promised a blindscan driver/software for Linux for over a year, I gave up waiting and with the help of some others wrote an application and tweaked the drivers to support blindscan, spectrum scan, and iq plot. Something Windows had had for awhile and us Linux users didnt.

Im so sick of listing to you whine about how you spent all this money and no one else did and no one seems to appreciate you. Suck it up buttercup. Just because you made some bad financial decisions doesnt mean the entire world wants to hear about your personal problems on a public forum. Start supporting the FTA community or get out of the business.

UDL

Mods: delete this if you want, I understand Im a little testy and if you think Im overly brash I'll account it up to the fact Im Infantry and wont be offended

updatelee said:

Your empty hopes about 4:2:2 is misleading as well. either the hardware supports it or it doesnt, no amount of hope can change whats inside the box. Have you seen the hardware yourself ? no ? you really shouldnt be filling consumers heads with unfounded hope about something you know nothing about. That's plain irresponsible.

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So you are implying that there can't be a software/player/codec solution? I thought, for example, that the Prof 7500 required sofware/codecs to decode 4.2.2. rather than it being built into the Prof 7500 hardware. And Dreamboxes, as you well know, can't decode 4.2.2.(hardware), yet you can stream them to your computer and VLC can decode and play it (software/codecs). What stops there being a software solution, if the processor can handle it?

Keith Brannen said:

So you are implying that there can't be a software/player/codec solution? I thought, for example, that the Prof 7500 required sofware/codecs to decode 4.2.2. rather than it being built into the Prof 7500 hardware. And Dreamboxes, as you well know, can't decode 4.2.2.(hardware), yet you can stream them to your computer and VLC can decode and play it (software/codecs). What stops there being a software solution, if the processor can handle it?

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streaming is different, I thought I was pretty clear about a hardware solution was the topic of that paragraph I posted, if not I apologize. Box's that can stream but not decode 4:2:2 themselves dont advertise 4:2:2 support. You'll never see a dreambox advertising 4:2:2 decoding ability.

UDL

updatelee said:

streaming is different, I thought I was pretty clear about a hardware solution was the topic of that paragraph I posted, if not I apologize. Box's that can stream but not decode 4:2:2 themselves dont advertise 4:2:2 support. You'll never see a dreambox advertising 4:2:2 decoding ability.

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And I wasn't talking about streaming, but how hardware that doesn't have built-in decoders of 4.2.2. can, through software/codecs, be decoded and displayed (either by Prof 7500 hardware/software, or by the roundabout Dreambox streaming, hardware to computer hardware/software).

Your paragraph that I quoted makes even less sense now, if you were only taking about a hardware solution. I fail to see any misleading statements, as pwrsurge said quite clearly: "We are aware that the AzBox Titan chipset won't support 4.2.2 but there is a small chance that it can be enabled some way in software given the fact that the processor on the Titan is fairly powerful."

Only thing I can see that you could possibly take issue with, is perhaps he should have said "decoded" instead of "enabled", and that certainly is an extremely minor point of semantics. I certainly understood what was meant (a possible software solution in the receiver), and if that was your issue, could have been corrected by you in a less confusing and simple way.

Keith Brannen said:

I certainly understood what was meant (a possible software solution in the receiver), and if that was your issue, could have been corrected by you in a less confusing and simple way.

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A software solution on the receiver? software on stb's dont decode anything, its all done in hardware. They dont have anywhere near the processing power to be able to decode even low bitrate mpeg2 in software on the receiver. If a stb doesnt have the hardware to decode the format the ONLY option is to stream it to a seperate device that can (either PC or other)

I know dreambox so I can comment only on that definitively. To view video on the tv you litterally read a bunch of bytes from /dev/adapter0/dvr0 and write that same bytes to /dev/adapter0/video0. You can do the same with a recorded file, read X num bytes from the file and write the same bytes to /dev/adapter0/video0, its actually such a simple process you can even use cat. I remember a long time ago someone had wrote a transcoding app to take SD youtube video's and transcode them, on an 400mhz mips processor it took 2-3x longer then the clip was to transcode. a 2min clip took 4-6min to transcode. Is the titan going to have a 1.2ghz processor? congrats, you can do very low bitrate SD in real time..... not alot of that in 4:2:2

UDL

updatelee said:

A software solution on the receiver? software on stb's dont decode anything, its all done in hardware. They dont have anywhere near the processing power to be able to decode even low bitrate mpeg2 in software on the receiver. If a stb doesnt have the hardware to decode the format the ONLY option is to stream it to a seperate device that can (either PC or other)

I know dreambox so I can comment only on that definitively. To view video on the tv you litterally read a bunch of bytes from /dev/adapter0/dvr0 and write that same bytes to /dev/adapter0/video0. You can do the same with a recorded file, read X num bytes from the file and write the same bytes to /dev/adapter0/video0, its actually such a simple process you can even use cat. I remember a long time ago someone had wrote a transcoding app to take SD youtube video's and transcode them, on an 400mhz mips processor it took 2-3x longer then the clip was to transcode. a 2min clip took 4-6min to transcode. Is the titan going to have a 1.2ghz processor? congrats, you can do very low bitrate SD in real time..... not alot of that in 4:2:2

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Thanks for the information. So it all depends on processing power. How does the Prof 7500 work, hardware or software/codec to view 4.2.2.? If software/codec what sort of processing power is required? Reason I ask is because nowadays quite a few STB receivers are really computers (internet access, media players, etc.) so if you had a powerful enough processor in the STB you would think that a software solution could be possible (sort of like the STB streaming to itself and being decoded by a program similar to VLC).

Keith Brannen said:

Thanks for the information. So it all depends on processing power. How does the Prof 7500 work, hardware or software/codec to view 4.2.2.? If software/codec what sort of processing power is required? Reason I ask is because nowadays quite a few STB receivers are really computers (internet access, media players, etc.) so if you had a powerful enough processor in the STB you would think that a software solution could be possible (sort of like the STB streaming to itself and being decoded by a program similar to VLC).

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Hopefully the Titan has enough processing power to at least receive SD 4.2.2 feeds in realtime using a software codec such as the CBC news feeds on 107.3W Ku-band. We are fully aware that there will be limitations with no hardware 4.2.2 support on this model but will try to do the best firmware-wise with the hardware we have to work with in order to adapt it to the North American market.

With a DVB card on your PC, things are different as your computer's CPU and GPU processing power is being used to decode 4.2.2 video in realtime. Modern day PC's have a lot more processing power than any STB.

Best regards,

PwrSurge
AzBox Canada & US

This thread has been very entertaining but i think the title should of been called "As the azbox world turns".
carry on folks.....

pwrsurge said:

Hopefully the Titan has enough processing power to at least receive SD 4.2.2 feeds in realtime using a software codec such as the CBC news feeds on 107.3W Ku-band. We are fully aware that there will be limitations with no hardware 4.2.2 support on this model but will try to do the best firmware-wise with the hardware we have to work with in order to adapt it to the North American market.

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LOL good luck with that !

Funniest thing I heard all day.

UDL

I bought my MicroHD from the fellow in Kentucky at gotcband.com

Is he an authorized MicroHD dealer also?

Pittsville said:

I bought my MicroHD from the fellow in Kentucky at gotcband.com

Is he an authorized MicroHD dealer also?

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might want to ask that in the MicroHD thread

Pittsville said:

I bought my MicroHD from the fellow in Kentucky at gotcband.com

Is he an authorized MicroHD dealer also?

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I assume you meant "authorized miniMe dealer" Yes, gotcband.com is an authorized AzBox US dealer. They should soon have the AzBox miniMe American Edition available for sale.


Best regards,


PwrSurge
AzBox Canada & US