test report dvb-t via wifi elgato tivizentele-audiovision.com/12/03/eng/elgato-tivizen.pdf · or...

58 59TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 02-03/2012 — www.TELE-satellite.com www.TELE-satellite.com — 02-03/2012 — TELE-satellite International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine

Elgato TivizenMobile DVB-T At Home

•TransmitsDVB-TviaWiFi•Quickinstallation•Exceptionalreceptioncapabilities•PVRfunctionpossible

TEST REPORT DVB-T via WiFi

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DVB-T via WiFi

Wireless terrestrial reception at home on your mobile phone, tablet or desktop PCThomas Haring

MAC TV

Modern SmartPhones are actually portable pocket mini computers that have become incredibly power-ful. And this is the perfect reason for the designers at the company Elgato to take the products from Apple and put their power to use in such a way that users can watch TV on their Smart-Phones: the Elgato Tivizen makes it possible to receive DVB-T on the Apple iPhone, iPad or the iPod Touch.

But the question is how do the DVB-T signals get to the SmartPhone? Blue-tooth? Unfortunately, it’s

way to slow. A USB 2.0 con-nection? Yes, it would be fast enough but who wants to deal with a tangled web of cables? There’s only one other way: WiFi, and that’s exactly what Elgato decided to use.

The Elgato box is roughly twice the size of a cigarette lighter (92 x 52 x 12mm) and weighs just about 68g including the rechargeable battery. The elegant front and back reflective covers are in perfect harmony with the silver stripe that runs around the outside of the Tivizen. It’s easy to recog-

nize the similarities to the Apple iPhone, but then, why not?

On the underside of the Tivizen can be found a mini USB port hidden behind a small cap which can be used to recharge the inter-nal battery. This also means that you can use any PC or MAC to power the Tivizen through this port. You can even power it in a car or RV using a USB car charger.

Unlike the mini USB ca-ble which is included in the package, a USB power supply is not included. Dur-ing our tests we were able to determine that a fully

TEST REPORT

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1. The Tivizen App Start Screen2. The Tivizen App’s Main Menu with the channel list entries on the right side.3. Multiple settings can be easily handled through the App.4. Sorting the available channels5. The time shift buffer memory size can be increase or decreased as needed.6. Thanks to its multitasking capabilities, the App can play the current channel along with its audio in the background while another app is active.

a little concerned that the telescopic antenna is thin-nest at the bottom where it connects to the Tivizen box and fattest at the top of the antenna unlike a typical antenna where it would be thickest at the bottom and gets thinner towards the top.

The only thing still miss-ing is the software. For the iPhone, iPad or the iPod Touch, the correct software can be downloaded free of charge from the iTunes App Store. But Elgato didn’t for-get the owners of PCs or MACs; the necessary down-load information is included with the Tivizen as well as the required license codes for EyeTV (Mac) and Ter-raTec Home Cinema (MS Windows).

We appreciated the fact that after starting the App precise information was given on how a connec-tion between the Tivizen and the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is created. The manufacturer also provided short but detailed notes on the operation of the DVB-T receiver. This information can also be found on the packaging.

To create a connection the settings menu in the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch needs to be accessed and a search for new WiFi net-works started. As long as the Tivizen is turned on the network will appear as its own entry and therefore can easily be selected. To clarify once again: the com-munication between the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and the Tivizen is made possible through the set up of a WiFi network that is operated by the Tivizen. It comes delivered from the factory without the need to enter a keyword.

By double-pushing the Home button, the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch displays a list of currently running Apps at the bottom of the

charged battery could pro-vide up to 210 minutes of uninterrupted TV enjoy-ment and since the battery can easily be swapped out, TV-aholics can simply carry a spare with them.

On the right side is a sin-gle button that turns the Tivizen on and off. Right next to this button is a small hole inside which is a recessed reset button; sticking a paperclip into this hole will reset the Tivi-zen to factory settings.

Momentarily pressing the button on the right side lights up two of the three LEDs (TV operation and charging status/battery capacity) on the top of the Tivizen. The third LED in-dicates the existence of a WiFi network.

It doesn’t matter how strong the DVB-T signals are, the hidden telescopic antenna in the top left side of the Tivizen should be pulled out. When it is fully extended it is 16cm long. The hinge at the bottom of the antenna lets you ad-just it 360° for best pos-sible reception. We were

Contents of the package: Tivizen DVB-T receiver, USB cable, software download card and instructions

screen; this allows the user to quickly access the Tivi-zen App to set up a WiFi connection. This is sup-ported by the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, the iPad as well as the iPad 2 and also the third and fourth gener-ations of the iPod Touch. On the software side, the iOS version 4.2 or newer must be installed.

If the Tivizen App is be-ing started for the first time, it will ask the user to select a location. The user can choose from Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Croatia, The Czech Re-public, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, In-donesia, Ireland, Italy, Lux-embourg, Macau, Malaysia, New Zeeland, The Nether-lands, Norway, Portugal, The Russian Federation, San Marino, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain,

South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tur-key, Ukraine as well as the United Arab Emirates.

After pushing the Chan-nel Scan button, the Tivi-zen will perform a search across the entire frequency spectrum for any receiv-able signals. In our tests this scan was completed in about 80 seconds on an iPad 2 or iPhone 4 whereby it found every useable DVB-T frequency and stored them completely and cor-rectly. The ability to per-form a manual scan of in-dividual frequencies was unfortunately not included in the App by the manufac-turer.

Immediately after the scan is completed, the Tivi-zen App switches over to the channel list and dis-plays all of the channels that were found. We es-pecially liked the display

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7. Channel Scan8. The Tivizen App can be used with the iPad in either horizontal or vertical modes.9. DVB-T playback

of the current and upcom-ing programs for each of the channels; of course, this would only be possible if this information is made available by the provider.

After briefly pressing the desired channel the App begins playing it back after a short delay of about four seconds. A detailed Info bar is blended in at the bottom of the screen that contains current EPG information for the current and upcoming programs as well as a pair of bar graphs that show the signal strength of the cur-rent DVB-T channel as well as the battery level of the Tivizen. If you tap your fin-ger anywhere in the vicinity of the TV signal, a control screen is displayed that can be used to either stop or re-cord the current channel.

If you’re scratching your head right now, let us ex-plain: the Tivizen App can store the currently running program in the internal memory of the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. There’s even a Time Shift function avail-able as well as fast-forward and rewind functions. It makes sense now why the App’s Main Menu included a Recordings button in addi-tion to Live TV and Settings buttons. The Recordings button let’s you play back previously stored content. Since the Tivizen App uses the widely distributed MPEG format for recordings, there is nearly an unlimited num-ber of editing tools available for you to use. As you can see, the Tivizen in connec-tion with an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch gives you a complete DVB-T receiver in-cluding PVR which you can just carry around in your pocket!

The manufacturer even included the ability to con-

tinue to play the audio of the current channel in the background if the user should start another App in the foreground. This is one way to pass the time dur-ing those long commercial breaks. Once the interrup-tion is over, the user simply needs to double-push the Home button to jump right back in to watching DVB-T TV.

The Tivizen ran effort-lessly throughout our entire testing process; there were no crashes or other errors to be seen. TV playback flowed smoothly without any pixilation or other inter-ference in the picture and that’s not surprising at all considering that the Tivizen uses a powerful ARM 9 RISC processor. We were a little disappointed to find out that the Tivizen in connec-tion with the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch does not sup-port HD content in MPEG-4 or H.264 via DVB-T; even DVB-T2 is not supported.

On the reception side of things, the Tivizen covers the entire VHF and UHF fre-quency ranges, that is, from 177.5 to 226.5 MHz (VHF) and 474 to 858 MHz (UHF). The COFDM demodulator supports 16 QAM, 64 QAM and QPSK with bandwidths of 6, 7 and 8 MHz. The in-tegrated telescopic antenna works quite well and eas-ily measures up to active DVB-T room antennas. To test its capabilities, we at-tempted to latch onto the DVB-T channels from The Czech Republic. We were located about 40km from the border and as you can see by the screenshots that accompany this test report, we managed to accomplish this without any problems at all.

Since we are dealing with a universal App for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, it needs to be down-loaded only once; it can then be used on all three of these devices. We also

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liked that Elgato matched the App perfectly to all the different display sizes. The huge advantage of the iPad for a better overview was cleverly put to use.

If it’s a MacBook that you have, it would be practical to be able to also use this device with the Tivizen. For this purpose Elgato has made version 3.0 of their own EyeTV software suite for Mac available to down-load for free. On the hard-ware side, EyeTV requires a minimum of a Mac with In-tel CPU as well as Mac OS X 10.5.8. The software itself can be installed with just a few mouse clicks and the necessary activation code is included with the Tivizen. To create a connection with the Tivizen, the WiFi func-tion of the MacBook needs to be used; the necessary settings can be found in the Mac OS X System Settings under the Network icon. And just like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, the MacBook also recognizes the Tivizen as a WiFi hotspot and builds a connection us-ing this transmission path.

Unfortunately, if your MacBook is connected to the Internet via WiFi, you have to make a choice: it’s either a WiFi connection to the router for Internet ac-cess or a WiFi connection to the Tivizen for DVB-T re-ception; it cannot be both at the same time. Here it would have been nice if the USB port on the Tivizen could also have been used for data instead of just for recharging the battery.

So, what’s the story with

Windows? Just like with the Mac, if you’re using a PC, you also have to set up a WiFi connection to the Tivi-zen. If you take a look at the available networks, you’ll see that the Tivizen is rec-ognized as a WiFi hotspot.

After just a few mouse clicks the wireless connec-tion is established. Unfor-tunately, the same situa-tion exists here in that the Tivizen takes over the WiFi interface and that a simul-taneous wireless Internet connection is not possible.

After the TerraTec Home Cinema Software has been downloaded from the El-gato website and then in-stalled and activated using the included product key, it automatically switches over to scan mode and asks the user for a valid chan-nel list. It should be men-tioned at this point that in order to use TerraTec Home Cinema, you’d need an MS Windows 7 PC (32 or 64 bit) with at least a 2.0 GHz Intel or AMD processor or Intel Atom CPU (for HD content an Intel Core2Duo CPU) as well as a minimum of 1GB of RAM. The scan process was completed in just about 64 seconds after which the names of all the available DVB-T channels at our loca-tion appeared in the chan-nel list.

We were quite surprised to see during our tests that the time the TerraTec Home Cinema needed to switch between channels was around 2-3 seconds; this was nearly twice as fast compared to Elgato’s own EyeTV Mac software. We’re not sure why there was such a large difference in times but we were nevertheless satisfied to see that a 2-3 second hardware-based channel switching time was possible. Elgato will almost certainly offer an update for EyeTV in the near future in which this difference will be addressed.

10. Changing channels during TV playback.11. Even the desired audio track can be selected.12. Recorded programs that include the programs description can be played back at any time.13. The Czech TV channel CT2 was received effortlessly at a distance of over 40km from the Czech border.

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1. The EyeTV software’s detailed EPG. It is used by the Tivizen when connected to a MacBook.2. The Tivizen appears as a separate entry in the list of available WiFi networks.3. Thanks to the virtual remote control, all of the software’s functions can be controlled.4. The TerraTec Home Cinema software is used with the Tivizen when connected to a Windows PC.5. The control center for the TerraTec Home Cinema software.6. The TerraTec Home Cinema software has its own editor so that commercial breaks can be snipped out.

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