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30-Sep-2009
iboum.com Best Current Media Player [October 2009]
This is the first of a monthly series of blogs regarding which is the current best Media Player.
We are going to break the marketplace down into two categories, Budget and High-End. Budget will be for players under US$180 / €150 and High-End will be for the rest. These categories and price limits will be prone to change in future as the market develops.
At the budget pricepoint there are now many options available. Firstly, we will discount the Sigma 8635 players. The Sigma 8635 players all suffer from poor full-HD performance and slow user interfaces. If you’re buying a new player today you should go for something using recent technology. That leaves the many Realteks, since the more modern Sigmas (8655/8643) are all outside of the price limit. If you require an internal Hard Drive then you have the Xtreamer, ACRyan PlayOn!HD, Mvix Ultio (MX-800HD), and Seagate FreeAgent+ to choose from. Of these, the Xtreamer followed by the ACRyan PlayOn!HD are our favourites. These two have had the greater firmware support so far and have the most features, although neither is the perfect player yet. When Realtek firmware 2.0 is released (12-Oct) then these players should gain a better user interface and improved usability. None of the internal Hard Disk players are our budget best buy. We feel that for a budget purchase price should be paramount, and the advantages offered by an external drive are minimal. In fact, the fans employed to control the additional drive heat are often these player’s biggest drawback (related noise). There are loads of non hard drive Realtek players, all offering the same performance and very similar user interfaces. Until there are significant difference in software implementations the main determinant is price. Therefore, our best budget Media Player accolade goes to the fanless and silent Brite-View CinemaTube BV-5005HD. It manages to beat every other networked Realtek player on price, whilst still having more features than most and an active support community churning out software updates.
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Brite-View CinemaTube BV-5005HD iboum.com Best Budget Media Player [October 2009] Buy: Amazon USA, $109.99 
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Things are more complicated when looking at high-end players. There are several high-spec Sigma 8635 players, one Sigma 8643, and a couple of Realteks. As with the budget category, we are going to discount the 8635s. Although players like the QNAP NMP-1000 have a lot of features and very comprehensive AV outputs, we could never recommend almost 2 year old technology at this price level. It is difficult to understand why the two expensive Realteks, the DViCO Tvix 6600, and theMede8er MED500X are in this category at all. They have very similar hardware performance to the budget Realteks, with only (fairly minor) software improvements. Neither of these players feature the kind of high level AV outputs and inputs that we’d expect at this price. So, that only leaves one possible choice, the Popcorn Hour C-200, and even this has it’s limitations. Conceptually the C-200 is a fantastic piece of kit. It has the latest chipset, an internal Blu-Ray option, an LCD screen, and very comprehensive AV outputs. The problems are in the current software. It is buggy and certain features are still in the process of being implemented. This is a Syabas machine though, so firmware updates are coming thick and fast. We await the Dune HD Base 3.0 to provide some competition in this category, but, with very little proper competition, we award our current best High-End Media Player award to the Popcorn Hour C-200.
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Popcorn Hour C-200 iboum.com Best High-End Media Player [October 2009] £280 / €207 / US$299 |
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Comments There are 4 comments
November 02, 2009 - 13:35
Your dismissal of the 8635 is misguided. If you want to rate hardware on it’s eventual potential, OK, but buyer beware. If the manufacturer never makes the hardware perform you are left out in the cold. This happened to me with a DLink box. I moved on to the Netgear EVA9150. It does pretty much everything it says it will, plus if you use the betas you get Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc via PlayOn. I suspect that you don’t see much discussion of about it on AVS because there is an active forum on the Netgear site, and because most people are very satisfied. Is it expensive, yes but the build is excellent. Are there still bugs in the software, yes. Win 7 is causing problems. Some people are having minor problems with subtitles and a couple of other issues. The interface could be better. As far as stuttering with HD TV, I don’t see any complaints in the forum, and when I do they are mostly network problems. Again, software is in many ways more important than hardware. Alan November 02, 2009 - 14:07
Thanks for the comment. I agree that software is important, you'll find this repeated all over the site. I cannot however agree with a player using a 2 year old Sigma chipset (EVA9150) being recommended above one using the latest Sigma chipset and being less than half the price (e.g. WDTV Live). The same applies to the Realtek chipset vs. the 8635. It is just better, both in decoding performance and potential for a slick interface. OK, the Netgear might do what you want today, but this site is about players for the future and there is a likelyhood that once more powerful players proliferate, media files will have developed to be too complex for a chip like the 8635. And that's without the bizzare price premium the 8635 attracts! The new Sigma and Realtek player represent, IMHO, a watershed for these devices. They are much cheaper but yet much more capable. Neither has any showstopping bugs, and both have format support as least as comprehensive as the 8635. Surely they are the bandwagon onto which we should be jumping? November 02, 2009 - 13:34
I use this site a lot November 02, 2009 - 13:33
HI Iboum, While googling for Sigma chipsets, I came upon your site. I’m delighted to find all the comparaisons & information, very well done ! I didn’t read all articles yet, but FYI I’m also interested to know when devices have the following features. Maybe some intresting thoughts for you as well then, or maybe already some you test thanks! - DVB-T recording (would elmiminate one more device in the AV rack!) Leave a Comment
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keep up the good work
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