Twinhan Magicbox USB freeview on your PC

[shifts]

A Tivo for your PC?

When I reviewed the Vision Dtv earlier this year I was quite simply amazed. Digital Freeview that worked on my PC became part of my setup. Rarely was it unplugged, and the TV became a mantelpiece to put books or cups of tea on. What made it for me is that, yes, it is an age old concept of TV on your PC, but I could pause programmes just like I could with my tivo. Think a more basic version of Sky plus - I choose what to record and then watch it when I want to.

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So 8 months on down the line Twinhan release the magic box. Completely different styling to that of the old unit. Gone is the grey box for a more urban warrior feel - this is apparent with the coating on the unit; It's now been designed to be carried about and used wherever there is a PC or laptop and a TV socket. The aerial is still included with the unit along with a nice "advice note" to say that it's really for open areas where you get a great signal. In the centre of a city I did manage to pick up BBC news 24, all be it very poorly.

When you compare the 2 units side to side, the Magic box does tend to feel the lighter of the 2 which considering the 'feel' of the unit is a bit of a surprise. Still we are now approaching 2nd generation of these units and like all things it has become lighter, if not exactly smaller.

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Installation.

The latest version of the software at the time of writing is 2.4.3.1 which is only a few steps up from the software supplied on the CD. Generally Twinhan themselves release a new software revision every few months which is nice to see, a Taiwanese company following through on a product and not doing a release and forget strategy.

The installation routine has been improved over older software models - one small example are the instructions. Finally, the instructions are translated into pure English and make sense; so no more vague Yoda style language like "Not installed are the drivers, error there is." Driver and software installation is simple and straight forward. When installing the drivers it does it in two steps, first the drivers are copied off the disc and installed, and then the viewing software is.

A small niggle here, the drivers aren't that easy to install for just the box. i.e. Say you have just the box installed and want to use some third party software. Most will have to install the complete software just to get the drivers on the system. A good move for the general purpose market and less technically minded people, which let's face it, will make up a good majority of the people who will purchase this unit, but for us tweakers who like to put latest drivers on, it's a bit more of a challenge.

First Looks

Interface wise, nothing has been overhauled and is still the same as the previous incarnations. A slight tweak shows the CAM icon for those watching encrypted channels and a few more icons on the left to take you to Help at the Twinhan site. If anyone has a CAM (conditional access module) that they want to lend me for testing feel free :D Other than that the look and feel is the same as the old software. Tool tips appear over all the buttons to guide you to their use.

On the far left hand side of the panel there is a "link" button that either takes you to the Twinhan site or it updates a file called terrestial.dll. What this does I'm not quite sure, but a guess is that it contains updated transponder settings according the region you are in.

The main display area indicates the volume, stereo sound, if a CAM module is attached, muted icon and the time. The square next to the cam sign indicates two things. 1) A lock onto a channel that you are watching, and 2)An icon that flashes to let you know you are recording. (Yes it's very much back to the 80s style of display with the way it looks, but non the less it works.)

Finally the 2 most important icons on the display in this area, Signal Quality and Signal Strength.

One cannot work without the other. You might have a strong quality of signal but if it's not strong enough then you get signal break-up, stuttering and intermittent sound. The strength of the digital signal is different to analogue, so even though you might have a brilliant terrestrial signal you might not automatically receive a great digital signal. My suggestion is to check the freeview website and if that checks out ok then you should be alright. (disclaimer here)

Aside from the main display, at the top area the channel forward and backward buttons are present, handy for armchair or PC chair surfers who want to click through the channels. The right hand side contains standard playback and recording controls. More details on this area later in the time shifting section.

Along the bottom there is; Preview all channels, Teletext (not implemented on the uk models yet), Electronic Program Guide, Recording list, Setup, Snapshot and Favourites. All these buttons are explained better with usage so let's get on with using the box

First time usage.

The spanner indicates the setup box to allow for scanning of channels. As you can see from the screenshots, the unit scans, locks, and then adds them to the list. If you travel to different areas and don't want to rescan every time you are somewhere new and on a different transmitter, you can save your channel listings and edit them accordingly. You can even add your own channels if it doesn't pick it up, as long as you know the right settings.

Now we have channels to watch, lets look at the other features in the panel. The recording setup allows you to set the time shifting zone. I normally set mine to 20 minutes just to allow for making a phone call whilst something is on that I want to watch. Its in the recording setup that twinhan have finally killed the wrong date bug. On the old software the date was miles off and if you werent awake then it was easy to setup a recoding for the wrong date, now it selects the right date. The other bug is still aparent on the channel listing, the amount of characters shown is just too small so there is a bit of guesswork at times needed to realise what channel you need to record. However tool tips come to the resuce again showing the channel name in full.

The conditial access module tab is pretty much redundant and is aimed more at the PCI range of their cards. A future review will see how well Topup TV performs and works. Finally the last tab, adjustment, lets tweaking commence. Well, I say tweaking - more of an adjustment for your system and the picture settings. If your card supports DxVA (such as the higher end nvidia cards), ticking this option takes some strain off the CPU. The rest of the settings are all fairly self explanatory.

Lets watch some TV

At this point I can either click play, or bring up the list of favourites and see what channel I want to watch. Daytime shopping TV can provide hours of mindless entertainment and so with a double click, Bid-up.tv appears. Notice that the screen has resized to change to the proportion of the program being shown. With most programs being shown in 16:9 format its a handy feature to have

This shows how programs are broadcast and in what format, and fortunately the Twinhan boxes handles them all. Another excellent feature is the way that it keeps the aspect ratio when resizing the window, a feature lacking in the previous version of the software. Switching the channels takes slightly longer than your average dedicated STB at just over a second, but that's still rapid enough to flick through at a nice speed.

If you can't decide what to watch, the preview button on the bottom of the main control panel brings up a preview of the channels, but only for that multiplex. Basically one multiplex can carry a number of channels, in this example four. This is how the box allows you to record one channel whilst watching another, as long as it's on the same stream that's being broadcast.

An example. Sky news is on but I want to record something on Sky travel. Easy. I can setup the EPG to record the program and watch Sky news. The only confusing part is that it looks like you are recording Sky news whilst watching it, when all it's doing is separating the data being sent to the box for how you see fit. The preview feature is very handy to see what is broadcast on the same multiplex stream and to set-up the watch one, record another feature. I've captured a BBC multiplex for a reference.

EPG Features (electronic program guide)

Mid 2004, seven day listings were broadcast as standard over the freeview network. This means that you can schedule what you require, when you want to watch it or record it. When you first click the EPG button you need to update the listings. When the listings are populated, just scroll, select what you want to watch and that's it. Sadly at the moment this only works for the channel you are viewing and there isn't as yet a way to watch one, and select the listings for another channel. This is being looked into, so I have been informed. Any programs you have recorded can be viewed in either a media player or in the application itself. Hitting the Record list brings up programs you have already set or you can import files from your hard drive into the list. This is limited at best. You can't view a program recording and playback one at the same time using the Twinhan software but if your system is up to it then it will happily cope.

Screen grabbing

As a default the software captures at a full specced BMP file which (as most will know) is huge. Here are a few random captures in JPEG mode so you can see what the default quality is like.

Time Shifting (aka the TiVo or Sky Plus Effect)

When I had my first TiVo a few years ago I instantly fell in love with it. Why? Because I was in control, I could watch what I wanted, spin through commercials and pause the TV if the phone rang or to cook my tea. Ok, this sounds like a normal VHS recorder I admit but the difference was that it worked.

What is timeshifting? This is the classic "hello world" example. So there you are, watching your program, the phone rings or the doorbell goes and this means normally missing your program to do what you have to do. Now imagine being able to press pause, do what you need to do, and come back and take up from where you left off. Whilst you are "catching up" the unit is still recording ahead so you won't miss the next program etc. Whilst watching the buffered video you can fast forward, pause, rewind or go right to the end and carry on watching live TV.

IMAGES REMOVED DUE TO IMAGE POSTING LIMIT :-(

So basically if you have paused the TV, gone off and done something, it carries on recording. When you get to the commercials you can then fast forward through them. Brilliant in theory, so lets try it with the Twinhan Magic box.

The time shifting button is the one on the far right just above the stop button. At this point the video is frozen for me to watch but it's recording in the back ground. At the top above the channel name and number is a slider bar just like in media players which shows how long you have paused TV. To carry on watching from where you time shifted, you click the timeshift button again.

It works brilliantly. With the sample that I recorded I could spin through the video, spin back, pause it and catch up to the real time point where I'm watching normal TV again. The only confusing thing is that the big play button, when time shifted, takes you back to the live signal. That's staying with the GUI design so I can't really fault it for that.

Usability In General

Overall the software, although looking like a 90s school programming project, executes the job it was designed for more than adequately. The point here is that it works and shows some level of commitment from Twinhan to improve and expand. The little things like tool tips, and aspect ratios staying true to the program you are watching when manually resizing the window shows this.

Picture Quality

This is the real killer part of this box. On the freeview.co.uk website I apparently can't get freeview but with a good aerial I can. However, this is at the loss of picture quality so if you are in a freeview area with a good aerial expect better results than the ones I have posted here. For me it works and does what I want it to do, however this will vary on where you live and your aerial condition. As the picture is a simple decode of what's broadcast this means that what you see is what's being broadcasted.

Epg usage and uses.

The EPG suffices and does it's job. Only being able to do one channel at a time is a little bit of a bind and a full featured system would be nice. The flip side is that at least with the freeview listings it will always be available and not reliant on a net connection to update them.

Overall.

There's not much really to find fault with the box. While it might not make things disappear like the name "magic box" implies, (well only the approx. ?75 for the unit) it works. Everything functions and runs in an engineered way and this gives a feel of that getting the thing running properly is first and foremost in the designers mind before adding fancy displays and the like.

That being said the listing on the record page does niggle me that you can't see it all fully - and why have the CAM section there unless its going to be used, or at least someone saying it will be. Again that's only really a minor point.

Overall>

9/10 - Great pictures and sound in a working package, now thats magic(box):DD

Thanks to Specialtech.co.uk for the review sample

UK Cost: Approx ?75

(notes, some of the images use jpeg compression so might not quite represent the actual quality of the video in display

[vroom23]

Sorry if i missed it in the post but do you need to use an additional Aerial or do you simply use the Box and your computer? as i have an outside Aerial of which is already in use.

[shifts]

There is an aerial that comes with it but its next to useless in built up areas. If you are in a wide open space like a field or something like that AND have a good transmitter nearby it should work.

The Twinhan magic box uses a rooftop aerial in the same way most people get normal terrestial TV. ALthough freeview may be available in your area some will ned to change their aerials if the installation is old or in poor condition

Digital Terrestial coverage is continuously being improved and more transmitters being brought online, however this takes time. To check if you can receive a digital transmission in your area input your post code at this website so see what you can get