• •The file-system based navigation is kind of clunky and I have realised I have been listening to lots of bands whose name falls in the early part of the alphabet just because it’s a ballache to scroll down any further.
• •There’s no option for playlists or shuffling by artist or genre
• •The TV Tuner takes over the box completely, so I can’t record a TV show and listen to music (if I have people come round, for example)
• •The last firmware update broke internet radio stations and there are no plans for any further updates to fix it
• •There’s a bug in the TV recording which means that ffwd/rewind don’t always work correctly

As I say, these are annoyances which I currently live with. They bother me sometimes (especially the last one), but generally I think it’s a great little box. However, K doesn’t get on with the box at all. We’ve been together 2 years now and she still can’t work out how to put on the TV or play some music; there are too many menu commands and special button presses to get there. In her words, it’s not very ‘joined-up’.

Also, the 2 years since I bought it have seen a huge increase in the number of online services which I’d like to be able to take advantage of – iPlayer, Hulu, Joost, Spotify, iTunes Movie Rentals – and none of these are possible through the TViX. We have even occasionally found ourselves dragging a DVD player out of the cupboard to watch a film that we have borrowed. Not ideal at all.

So, the requirements are: a small form factor device with plenty of storage, capable of playing a variety of audio and video formats, a user-friendly interface and remote, a (preferably dual) TV Tuner with PVR capabilities, a DVD player and access to online content. It should also be able to handle HD when I finally get a big telly (the TViX is standard def only). Not too much to ask, surely?

I was having the same issues as the chap in this thread on MPC Forums. I had followed all the necessary instructions, but still no dice. Here’s what I had to do to get it working.

To create and /etc/exports file:

sudo vi /etc/exports

once in vi, you need to hit I to enter insert mode. Then you can create your file.

/Users/tismey/Movies -maproot=tismey -network 10.0.0.0 -mask 255.255.0.0

What this means is:
I am sharing the directory /Users/tismey/Movies
The -maproot switch maps the root NFS User to my admin user on my machine – tismey.
Using the -network and -mask switches I am sharing the directory to any machine on my internal network (I use the standard Airport 10.0.x.x addressing)

Once done, hit ESC to exit insert mode, then

:wq!

to exit vi and write the file.

You can then check that the file is correct by running

sudo nfsd checkexports

If this produces no output, then all is right with the world. When I ran this, it spotted that I’d actually got a typo in the file (timsey not tismey), and it gave the error ‘Unknown User’.

However, running

showmount -e

was showing no output, so something still wasn’t right. I had a closer look at the options available to nsfd, and thought I would try

sudo nfsd update


Once I’d done this, the output from showmount was

Exports list on localhost:
/Users/tismey/Movies 10.0.0.0

Success!! A few minutes later and I was successfully streaming from my MacBook to my TViX!

I decided to get a new Airport extreme – it’s wireless-n compatible so its future-proof, and it has the option to share a hard drive plugged into its USB port across the network. My plan was to set this to store my itunes Library and share it with the TViX via SMB networking so my computer didn’t need to be on.

Initially, no dice. I just couldn’t get the TViX to see the Airport Disk. I thought I was going to have to go back to the drawing board but dropped a mail to the Dvico support desk just in case. They finally got back to me on Friday.

The TViX sends a username/password combo of tvixhd1/tvixhd1. If you set up your Airport disk to share using an account with these credentials, then put the IP address of your base station in the TViX Networking options with a Share name of tvixhd1, it can see the disk fine.

Only issue I’ve found – the box crashes if you have slideshow pictures in the folder with your music and you click ‘Play’ on a Music file. If you click ‘Play’ on an image file instead, it works fine.

As yet there’s no pause/rewind of live TV – I hope this will be implemented in future firmware upgrades but that aside, it’s perfect for my needs. I’ve used an aerial splitter so I can still use my old freeview box on the offchance that there’s ever a time that I want to watch one channel while recording another, but we’ll see if that ever becomes an issue. There’s so little on that I actually want to watch that I’d be very surprised if that ever happened.

Unfortunately, even after following the instructions in the manual (call the file tvix.jpg – the case doesn’t matter, a size of 720×480 is recommended), I couldn’t get the damn thing to display. A post at the TViX Box Forums�yielded the solution; the manual’s wrong. Apparently the case of the file name DOES matter – it MUST be a case-sensitive TViX.jpg, and the file must be EXACTLY 720×480.

• D-Link DWL-G122 (HW ver. C1)
• Belkin F5D7050 with Ralink chip
• Linksys WUSB54GC

I eventually went for the Linksys, simply because it’s the only one where you can be confident you’re getting the right model. I did try a Belkin, but apparently they’re used several different chipsets in that particular model and there’s no way of telling which one you’re going to get unless you look at the contents on the CD-ROM. I got the wrong one, obviously.
However, plugging in the Linksys opened up all the wireless configuration options in the menu and it didn’t take very long to get it up and running on the network. A slightly annoying restriction is that it only supports 64-bit WEP, which means I had to downgrade my security slightly to get the box on my network. I imagine this will probably be dealt with in a future firmware update.
The setup is fairly self-explanatory if you’ve ever had to set up any network device, but it’s certainly not ZeroConf. There’s a manual available from the manufacturers though, and they’ve also put together a little video to walk you through it if needs be.

First up, file system formats. The TViX box supports both FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, but only FAT32 is read/write available on the Mac. If you’re only planning on using the box for watching video you’ve downloaded or ripped from DVDs, then this won’t be a problem – simply format the drive as FAT32 using Disk Utility’s ‘MS-DOS Filesystem’ option. However, if you’re planning on using the optional TV Tuner to turn the box into a PVR then this will only work with NTFS-formatted disks, which could be a problem.
I came up with 3 options, 2 of which ended up being feasible:

• Partition the drive, format a smaller first partition to NTFS for use for recording, and a second as FAT32 for copying data onto. Because NTFS drives will mount read-only in the finder, it’s possible to copy anything you’ve recorded with the PVR onto the other partiction for safekeeping if you so desire.
• Format the whole drive as NTFS, network up the TViX box and use the built-in FTP server to transfer data to it. This has the advantage of not creating the ._ ‘hidden’ files that Macs create on the TViX when it’s mounted as a USB disk. The disadvantage is that transferring over the network will be slower than via USB2
• The third, not yet feasible, option is to use MacFuse to install NTFS drivers on the Mac. This would be the ideal, but it seems that the current NTFS-3G drivers aren’t stable enough for my liking – there are reports of disk images no longer mounting once they’re installed and other things that make me a bit uneasy. When these drivers are updated, I’ll look into it more seriously as an option.

Of course, the first 2 options require you to have access to a PC, or an Intel mac with Boot Camp, to format the drives as NTFS in the first place. If you don’t have this, or can’t bring yourself to sully your hands with Windows, then the TV Tuner option is something you’ll have to live without for now.

I ordered the TViX from KJ Global, who appear to currently be the only UK stockists, and a 750GB Seagate Barracuda HDD from Dabs. Doing it this way saved me about �60 on buying one from KJ with the drive already fitted. Fitting the drive was extremely simple; a small flap on the side of the TViX pops open (a bit like a battery compartment on a walkman) and you simply screw the drive guide onto the drive (2 screws) and slide the drive in. You then plug in the ribbon cables and you’re away. It took me all of 5 minutes.

Setting it up was just as simple. The TViX comes with all the cables you need, so I hooked it up to my PowerBook’s USB2 and�formatted the drive to FAT32 (the misleadingly-named ‘MS-Dos Filesystem’) using Apple’s Disk Utility, which took about 20 minutes. Once this was done, the TViX just appeared in the Finder like a normal drive and I was able to copy my DV content onto it by simple drag-and-drop.

Finally, I hooked it up to my TV using the supplied composite video cable and, with baited breath, powered it up. It�worked like a charm; browsing the folder structure via menus on the TV screen from the comfort of my sofa, I kicked off the episode of The Wire I had ripped from DVD and it played it quite happily. It seems to handle AVI and MPEG files no problem at all.

My only gripe is actually more of a Mac thing than a TViX thing. When accessing the TViX from my PowerBook, OSX leaves a mess of resource fork files all over the drive in the form of ‘invisible’ files. Unfortunately, these files aren’t invisible to the TViX, so they’re a bit annoying. I can’t imagine it’s going to be much of a stretch to write a little shell script or something to tidy them up though, and if that’s all the messing about that I have to do then I think I’ve got away quite lightly.

The next stage is to look into networking (it has a built-in Ethernet port and can be wireless with an adapter)�and to pick up the digital TV tuner add-on�so that I can use it to record TV straight to the box. There are so many possibilities for this bit of kit that I’m really quite excited to explore them all.�