Talented Android developer “Csharpe” has been hard at work and released a custom version of the Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for the Andy Pad Pro tablet only days after the official release, promising to fix a few issues including adding support for the official Google Play app.

Here is what he has to say about it:

After a long night of work I finally got things together & completed my first release for the AndyPad Pro ICS.
My goal with this ROM was not to remove as many as I could (which I did on the GB releases). I wanted to create a standard Google tablet instead, without all the bloatware that comes with some firmware.

This first release includes:

Android 4.0.4 (running on 3.0.8 kernel released with stock rom)
All Google apps (Play Store, Talk, Face-unlock, Gmail, Youtube HD)
Face-unlock (Settings ->;;;;; Security)
Apex Launcher as the default launcher
Latest Superuser (if you don’t want this, you can remove the su binary from /bin using the Android SDK)
Ad-hoc support (Tethering from phone / Windows 7)
Zipaligned apk
Bootloader v2.14, which allows custom recoveries. Expect CWM soon.
Busybox (without the symlinks)

I am looking forward to testing this out. Be aware this is for the Pro version of the tablet only.

More information at the Andy Pad Forums

The Broadway 2T is a network DVB-T dual tuner – note only DVB-T not T2 so no Freeview-HD in the UK. Having said that as this is primarily  aimed at streaming to network devices the lack of HD playback is probably a good idea.

Setting it up is simplicity itself. You connect it to an aerial  and a network connection (initially this has to be wired) and then go to http://distan.tv. A very simple to follow setup wizard will walk you through scanning for channels and if you want to connecting the Broadway to your Wi-fi network. I have to say  I had mixed results using Wi-Fi, particularly if the viewing PC or iPad/iPhone was also connected by Wi-Fi, with quite a bit of signal breakup so I would suggest for consistent quality using a wired connection.

Once you have setup the device going to http://distan.tv will prompt you for a 4 digit security code and then show you a screen with a list of channels on the left hand side and a preview window on the right. This web pages worked on just about every device I threw at it  – both PCs and iPhones/iPads.

When I first used the device I was disappointed by a lack of program guide but Hauppauge have released a firmware update which resolves this and also adds the brilliant ability to record to a USB device plugged into the Broadway unit. Once I found a USB key it actually recognised this worked really well and was fairly intuitive. The recordings can be viewed from the same web site as the live TV.

One slight moan here. Hauppauge need to organise their download sections better. In carrying out this article I needed to download the new Firmware, a new version of their TV software and a patch to let the TV software work with the new firmware – I had to visit three sites to get all of these. Hauppauge.co.uk, Hauppauge.com and for the patch PCTVsystems.com. Now I know the latter site  is a subsidiary of Hauppauge and knew to try there and the other sites but how many users would. Note: www.PCTVsystems.com  does now have all the files in their downloads section but neither of the Hauppauge sites do.

With the new firmware you do get a pretty good set of guide data, although it can take a while to update. Picture quality on the stream is reasonable and you can improve the bit rate in settings if you have a higher quality network.

I should point out that the firmware is currently beta and I did have a couple of lockups particularly when running at high bit rates which required a reset of the Broadway.

One area that Hauppauge have been working quite hard on lately is Windows Media Center integration and the Broadway is no exception – although the support is a little hard to find!

To get the Broadway working you will need to download the latest version of TV Center (6.4 at present) – don’t worry you won’t be forced to install the complete suite. On install you will be prompted if you want to install the Media Center Drivers and as part of this you will get Broadway support. Once this is installed a little Broadway icon will appear in your tool tips and it will show any detected devices and the tuners associate with them. This applet also fools Media Center into thinking it has the Broadway tuners attached as DVB-T devices and you can go ahead and set them up like any other DVB-T tuner.

One gotcha is the aforementioned patch – without this all will appear to install correctly but you won’t get any channels found. The patch is on www.PCTVSystems.com and is called Hotfix für TVCenter Software Ver. 6.4.1 and Broadway 2T, Firmwareversion 2.5 when you can’t find it.

Once setup they have full DVB-T support including interactive and sub-titles. You can also watch one tuner on the Media Center whilst using the other on say an iPad. A big caveat here – watching two channels is a huge bandwidth drain and I found to use it in this manner I had to dial way back on the quality for the iPad app. This is also a bit of an issue if you want to use both channels in Media Center and I found if I was watching one channel and recording another i got quite a bit of breakup on the recording. Using a wired gigabit network did improve this greatly and it was then usable but something to be aware of.

With that caveat getting the Broadway into Media Center was very straightforward and I certainly enjoy the convenience of using it on a PC in another room to the aerial socket. I should note that Media Center cannot make use of the Broadway’s in built recording system and all recordings are on the local PC.

I didn’t have such luck when trying to use the Broadway with DVBLogic’s DVBlink software. Alhough DVBLink recognised the devices I just could not get it to tune any channels.

All in all I like the Broadway. It is really easy to set up, the new firmware has made it a great standalone video recorder (particularly in an iPad using  environment) and it integrates into Media Center very well. My only concern is around the Network reliability but that would apply to any device streaming  high-quality video.

Last month Ceton announced they were to develop mobile companion apps for Windows Media Center and over the weekend they released the first beta to testers that applied for the beta.

UPDATE: Also in beta are the Android and iOS versions

The initial testing is focused on the Television and Movies experience and has EPG support, movie meta data and full remote control. I have only had a quick play on my test machine and I have to say it looks very nice. There is the Windows Phone app (which looks great) and a server addin that you run on your Media Center machine. I will have a play with it and post my impressions later this week.

Hats of to Ceton for not locking down the app to their own hardware.

Ever wondered how hinges on new designs of Notebooks are tested? Or if your laptop will work in sub-zero temperatures? Well HP have have a lots of different tests and in Shanghai they demonstrated some of the processes they use to test the rigors of daily use and extreme temperatures.

Last week I tried to get Raspbmc installed on my Raspberry Pi but I couldn’t get the image to boot up and it looks like that I was not the only one. Today there is a new build of the Raspbmc that could fix the SD card issues. I will be giving this a try over the next couple of days.

Via Raspbmc blog:

So the beta has launched, and for some it’s going great, others can’t get it installed. The reason for this being that Raspbmc has two separate booting components, the installer, which was created a long time ago and uses old firmware, and the release itself, which had newer, more modern firmware.

A simple upgrade of firmware would resolve this issue, however I have also resolved issues involving the creation of RAMDISTRIBUTION so that it can be done more frequently, as increasing SD card support becomes available from the Pi foundation. The installer now uses official and unmodified firmware from the foundation, because no special enhancements are needed for installation, and it becomes a lot easier to maintain synchronicity with their firmware releases if we can simply pull them down in binary form.

I’ve also updated the kernel on Raspbmc, partly to fix the timeout issues in the release itself, and partly to advance the release. Made available are the kernel headers, so you can now build modules, a preempt kernel, for what I hope delivers better performance, some IR configuration changes that will hopefully make remotes configurable. If you can, please try and get your remote going.

You can now grab the new beta image here, and that should work a lot better. Bare in mind that the current issues reported by users still exist, this update is just for the installer, rather than anything else.

If you can still get analogue TV signals you may want to give DVBLogic’s latest product a try. DVBLink AnalogTV! is a server for analogue TV signals including FM radio channels and brings them to Windows Media Center. You get full EPG supports via Media Center, xmtv of other supports EPG sources and supports SECAM, PAL and NTSC. It maybe worth digging out your analogue tuners even if it;s just for FM radio in Media Center.

Details from DVBLink:

Introducing the latest addition to the DVBLink product line - DVBLink AnalogTV!

Give your old analog TV tuners a new life with the DVBLink AnalogTV! Using it in combination with DVBLink Connect! Server enables distribution of analog TV channels and recorded TV around the house and on the go using all existing clients – DLNA clients, Windows MediaCenter, web browser, mobile clients and Boxee.

DVBLink AnalogTV product features:
- Seamless integration of analog TV channels into Windows MediaCenter
- Seamless integration of FM radio channels into Windows MediaCenter
- Automatic color system detection with per-channel overwrite possibility
- State-of-the-art software mpeg-2 audio/video encoder optimized for producing excellent picture quality with moderate CPU requirement
- Per-channel selection of EPG information source: Windows MediaCenter EPG, xmltv or other supported DVBLink EPG sources
- Support for multiple analog TV tuners from different brands
- Supports PAL, SECAM and NTSC color systems (depending on the tuner capabilities)

Preconditions
DVBLnk AnalogTV v4.5 is not compatible with DVBLink product 4.0, 4.1, 3.x and 2.x versions. It can be used standalone or installed next to DVBLink 4.5 beta products, described in this topic:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=18879&start=60
If you would like to use DVBLink AnalogTV in combination with DVBLink Connect! Server, the connect server should be v4.5 and also taken from the topic above!

Installation instructions:
- unzip the contents of a zip file to some sirectory on your hard disk
- install DVBLink Server first (if it is not installed yet) by running dvblink_server.msi. 
- install DVBLnk AnalogTV by running dvblink_analogtv.msi
- Open http://localhost:39876 and activate product trial (click on the red line and then press Activate button).
- Once activated, go to the Sources tab of DVBLink configuration web page, add a source, select active tuner device, scan TV/Radio channels and … enjoy!

Notes
At the moment there are no Wiki pages available for DVBLink AnalogTV product yet. We hope that software configuration is largely self explanatory, but if you in doubt – just ask us!

The beta 1 of DVBLink AnalogTV product can be downloaded here:
http://www.dvblogic.com/download/Trunk/ … _45_b1.zip

Let us know what you think!

DVBLogic team

The long awaited Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” update for the Andy Pad tablet devices is finally here and I upgraded my Andy Pad Pro tablet straight away. The update process is fairly straight forward with detailed instructions available on the Andy Pad website. It is a manual update via an installer package that needs to be run on a Windows PC.

I initially bought my tablet after hearing great things about it on TDL to mainly be used by my two daughters who are 5 and 2 respectively. While I was impressed with the hardware and build of the device the standard software ROM running Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” left a lot to be desired. I found the device very slow and unresponsive and at times touch input pretty inaccurate. Another problem was the lack of the Android Market (now Google Play) on the device, which for a casual user who isn’t as tech savvy could cause confusion. Luckily some clever developers released a series of custom ROMs for the device which greatly improved the speed and usability and added support for the official Android Market. I have been running a custom ROM ever since.

Having never used ICS on a device before I really wasn’t sure what to expect but I have to say it has given the Andy Pad a whole lease of life which in my opinion was desperately needed at this stage of the device’s life cycle. The UI is simply beautiful, fast and responsive making this feel like a completely new tablet. Everything just works so much quicker, from changing settings to loading apps. I’ve also noticed my battery life has improved quite a bit. It is so much more intuitive to use and setup than previous versions of Android that even I feel comfortable using it coming from an iOS tablet background.

Thankfully the developers opted not to fill their software image with unnecessary apps or too much branding whatsoever leaving it up to the user do. You do get apps such as Dropbox, Evernote, TuneIn Radio and Twitter which is a nice start.
Unfortunately the old problem of not having the official Google Play app has cropped up once again (I don’t think they are allowed to bundle it in) but they do supply an alternative called “GetJar” preinstalled. At the time of writing users are finding GetJar to work on certain apps and not others, just hanging on a download screen, as was my experience. Fortunately on the Android ecosystem it is pretty easy to install third party “markets” to get access to the majority of the free apps.
I tried to manually add the Google Play apk and although it did install, let me log in and browse the market, as soon as I tried to download an app it crashed and refused to work again. I small setback but I’m sure it won’t be long before this is resolved.

To summarise, I would definately recommend upgrading to ICS on the Andy Pad regardless of which ROM version, custom or otherwise, you were running before as the improvements in terms of speed, UI and sheer usability greatly outweigh the teething problems that all initial releases encounter. The fact that the developers have worked on this release at this stage of the life cycle of the product shows their commitment as well. The only reason I would not recommend upgrading just yet is if you are a heavy user of PAID Google Play apps as you will lose access to these until somebody figures out how to get it working on this software version.

For more information go to the Andy Pad website here.

One of TDL’s favourite Android Tablets the developed in deepest Norfolk  AndyPad now has an update for ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich). Head over to http://www.andypad.co.uk/upgrade.aspx for details.

TDL contributor Dangelus has already performed the upgrade and has said it works well. A full write up coming later.

As well as a new version of the DVBLink server DVBLogic have released a new version of the DVBLink app for Android. Version 1.1.3 includes fixes for display issues and can be downloaded from Google Play.

Checkout my review of the Android version from earlier this year.

DVBLink Android client v1.1.3 is available!

25 May 2012

What is new/fixed:

• Fixed: too-large app layout and fonts on low-density screens
• Fixed: long delay before loading EPG after scrolling
• Added: single click on date calls up a date selection dialog

The update can be downloaded from Google Play.
Enjoy!

Firecore have just released an update to the Seas0nPass jailbreaking tool for the Apple TV. This update provides an untethered jailbreak of the latest version of the iOS for the 2nd gen Apple TV (support for the 3rd gen is coming soon)

Today we are happy to release a brand new version of Seas0nPass that provides an untethered jailbreak of the latest 5.0.1 (iOS 5.1.1) software for the 2nd gen Apple TV. Massive thanks goes to @pod2g and Co. for the countless hours that went into making this new release possible.

What about the new 3rd gen Apple TV?

Unfortunately Seas0nPass is not yet compatible with the new ATV3. Work is still ongoing and we’lll be sure to announce any and all news as soon as it becomes available. Be sure to follow us on Twitter,Facebook and Google+ for up to the minute info.

Which plugins are currently supported on 5.0.1?

• Couch Surfer (works)
• Last.fm (works)
• Maintenance (works)
• Media Player (works)
• NitoTV (works)
• Plex (works)
• RSS Feeds (works)
• Rowmote (works)
• Weather (works)
• XBMC (works)
• Overflow (not working)
• Remote HD (not working)

Superb! Where can I get it?

As always, Seas0nPass is available as a free download from Seas0nPass.com.

Troubleshooting tips can be found here.