Stand alone media player suggestions

[hybry]

Boxee box I think will be america only, so not something that I will be waiting for.

I am having a second look at media player PC alternative, cause I found ASUS AT3IONT-I Deluxe, got a HDD and all I need is a RAM and I am good to go. Will need a case at some point as well of course.. 😀

 

[Modelworks]

What is sad about that link is there are very few 4 star rated and NO 5 star rated boxes. I just dont' get why manufacturers can't get these things right.

Really hard to judge by reviews. A lot of the complaints I read are things that are not the fault of the players. One of the big misconceptions people have is that a media player should play everything a pc can play and at a $100 price.
That will never happen and for good reason.

Media players are designed to play industry standard formats. PC play user formats. Where the two differ is that industry has a preset guide of what is allowed and what is not,no gray area. Either a file is standard compliant or it is not.

User formats are ones that do not follow the rules for one reason or another. Sometimes people want to change resolutions or use a matrix to encode that works better for them but is not part of the formal standard. To accommodate them codec programmers add support for that in the decoder usually noting it as not part of the normal specification. The cycle repeats and before long you have people thinking that something like h.264 means any video , that it is just encoded with that codec and that is what makes it h.264. They then get upset when the media player doesn't play the file.

On the pc using whatever you like works because you can routinely update the decoder. On the $100 player it isn't so easy. When the box boots up it already has the decoder for the formats it supports in physical hardware. It can't make radical changes to the chips. The only changes it can make are microcode updates and those are for really minor things . They can't just add new codecs. Sometimes you get lucky and a manufacturer will tweak the microcode to allow support of some non spec files but it can vary a lot.

If someone is going to rip their own content then they can choose the correct formats and have zero problems with media players. If they are planning to download video from lots of sources then a pc is the only way because sooner or later you will come across someone breaking the rules and encoding something that only their software was designed to play.

I am going to make a chart showing all the industry standards and what the settings need to be to be compliant so hopefully people will read it and try to encode to those settings. It makes things a lot less hard to share .

 

[Homerboy]

Still.... all I ask for is video shuffle.
Arggh!

 

[Modelworks]

Still.... all I ask for is video shuffle.
Arggh!

That is something that really should be easy to implement.
Which media player do you have currently ?
I recall you mentioning about the feature before but I lost the post
somewhere.


One of the huge pitfalls with the media players out now is that they all are based mainly on sigma chipsets. Sigma designs makes some great hardware but the sdk they use leaves a lot to be desired. Often getting some things to work that should be easy to do requires a lot of trickery. It is like a platform where everything is piled on everything else and moving anything the wrong way can cause the whole thing to fall.

They changed that with the newest processor but I haven't seen it used in anything new for media players. The chip has a new engine that allows for fancy menus, picture in picture and all sorts of things but so far is only being targeted by cable box use. If and when it comes to the set top market it will be the one to get.

Sigma Designs GF9452
SUPPORTED TECHNOLOGIES
• Supports all DTV video and PC graphics formats
• Supports active raster size up to 2048x2048
• High quality motion and speed adaptive deinterlacing
• Multi-tap scaling engine with panoramic scaling and aspect ratio conversion
• Multiple on-screen video display, including picture-in-picture (PIP), picture-on-picture (POP), picture-by- picture (PBP)
• Adaptive 3D noise reduction
• Mosquito noise reduction and block artifact reduction
• Adaptive detail enhancement featuring sharpness and texture enhancement with precise overshoot control
• Adaptive contrast enhancement
• User programmable gamma correction
• Two independent channels of VXP ® processing
• Support for 12-bit input and output on both channels
• Flexible output architecture to support single, dual, and twin channel outputs
• Advanced film mode detection and compensation for interlaced and progressive sources, including support for frame-locked 3:3 (72Hz) and 2:2 (48Hz) output cadence generation
• Frame rate conversion with full support for genlock and frame-lock operation
• Robust film cadence detection for interlaced and progressive sources providing fast 3:2/2:2 lock time, bad edit recovery, and support for extended film cadences
• Block artifact reduction identifies block artifacts introduced by source compression, adaptively smoothing the block boundaries


Video Input/Output Formats 8-/10-/12-bit RGB or 4:2:2/4:4:4 YCbCr
16-/20-/24-bit RGB (G, BR) or 4:2:2/4:4:4 YCbCr (Y, CbCr)
24-/30-/36-bit 4:4:4 YCbCr (Y, Cb, Cr)
24-/30-/36-bit RGB

4 x 512MB DDR2-667 Memory

 

[Homerboy]

I don't have any right now (well 2 XBMC machines currently running). I want a couple of cheap set-top boxes though for some additional TVs in the house (don't need anything fancy and $$$ like XBMC). I WILL but whichever one ends up having shuffle though. I was commenting on the Patriot forums and after a few backed my request, one of the reps said it was something they could implement and that he'd get back in a couple of weeks. This was month ago.

Almost all of them can shuffle music. Shuffling video shouldn't be that much different.

 

[Modelworks]

Almost all of them can shuffle music. Shuffling video shouldn't be that much different.

It would be really easy to implement on the wdtv live. Install custom firmware, very easy to do. Download update to a usb stick, plug into WDTV and plug in the box. The box will say, found update, install ? , select ok, wait for it to finish , about 5 minutes tops and you are done.

After that you can telnet into the box and it is running debian linux. From there you can use any of the normal script languages like python to make it work like you want. Add torrents, usenet, or whatever.

 

[vshah]

doesn't popcorn hour have a BT client built in?

 

[Modelworks]

doesn't popcorn hour have a BT client built in?

If it doesn't it can be added. There really is nothing that one brand does over the other that makes BT clients possible. With the way the players are designed the cpu spends most of its time doing nothing while video is playing. 5-600Mhz of cpu power just idling waiting for something to use it 🙂
The DSP core does all the video decoding, the cpu just acts as traffic cop telling what bits to read off the file next.

 

[hybry]

Popcorn hour is the same price at which I can build a mITX PC which is what I am considering now.

Just not too confident my ability to manage custom FW on WDTV Live (considering the linux pedigree) otherwise that would be the one for me.

Model, strange you say many players are Sigma, most I see are Realtek. But I hear Sigma has noticable better image quality as well.

 

[Destiny]

Popcorn hour is the same price at which I can build a mITX PC which is what I am considering now.

Just not too confident my ability to manage custom FW on WDTV Live (considering the linux pedigree) otherwise that would be the one for me.

Model, strange you say many players are Sigma, most I see are Realtek. But I hear Sigma has noticable better image quality as well.

I owned both a Realtek (ASUS, Medigate) and a few Sigma Designs (Nixeus Fusion HD and PCH-A200) media players and I agree with your comment and I also agree with Model's reasoning. There is no perfect media player out there... if you want one you may have to go out and build one yourself an HTPC which may cost more, consume more power, and is not portable... most of us whom have been upgrading our PCs may have some old components lying around that can be used to build a good HTPC.

Out of all the Media Players I have owned, the Nixeus Fusion HD was the only one that had a stable firmware out of the box. The built in web browser is okay for normal browsing and they're looking to improve on it. For streaming local content, YouTube, and when you install an internal HDD it works great. It is also one of the few players out there that has BT Client.

Their recent firmware release now allows it to support Blu-Ray ISO (no menus though). Future firmwares they're looking to add YAMJ, Seamless Blu-Ray Braunching, and Flash Video support for their built-in Web Browser.

Best Deal I found on it @ sonicselectronix: Free shipping with a premium branded Nixeus HDMI 1.4 Cable (8 Feet and 3D Ready HDMI Cable)
http://www.sonicelectronix.com/item_27608_Nixeus+Fusion+HD+-NX-1000+HD-.html

Here is a thread that talks about it:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1265806

That forum also has a lot of good info on other media players.😉