Network media player update

[ian.bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I have now had the HD MediaBox MB100 by PixelMagic for a week or so
and on
the whole things are going well. I will put together a small review for
Mark with photos etc. once I have answers to some of my questions. The
summary so far though is:
DVD playing from my NAS box. Generally few problems but there are 2
annoying ones.

1) There is sometimes a slight pause every now and again similar to a
normal DVD changing layers. This happens once to three times on a normal
length DVD.
2) Occasionally the screen will freeze whist playing a movie. This has
happened on both VOB files and an AVI. Rewinding a few seconds and
pressing play cleared the VOB ones.

After noting the pausing problems I bought a new 500 Gig hard drive to fit
to the unit internally to see if this would help. I fitted it with few
problems and plugged it into the PC to copy the files across. To my
eternal embarrassment I even had to read the manual at this point as I had
never had to format a USB drive before. Anyway, several hours later it was
done but I was running out of time so I copied a single AVI file to the
drive and took the unit back in for the missus and I to finish watching
the Fab 4 film. It played well right up to the point where it froze as in
point 2 above. Now, being an AVI I pretty soon discovered that it did not
rewind or do any of the other tricks I had found worked on the VOB files.
I was able to find out how far into the movie I was and that was about it.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the AVI would rewind and jump to a time
stamp etc. but only when being played from my NAS drive. This is very odd
and I will be asking about it on the forums over the weekend. Of course as
most of us know AVI files are strange things and to jump in 40 mins I had
to enter 10 mins in the jump screen. I guess this is all down to the
compression codecs so I don't really hold this against the unit itself.

Suffice to say this is not a completely problem free solution but I am
very pleased with the unit so far. It comes the closest to a solution that
any of the units I have tried to date have. My current thinking in light
of experience so far is to hold VOB files on the local hard drive and
AVI's on NAS units through the network interface. Picture quality and
sound are first rate and I would not know I was not watching the original
DVD. My setup is modest though with a Sony 28 inch digital TV and the
sound played trough the TV. Sadly I am not allowed to upgrade the TV to
anything over 32" and only then when it dies. My missus is becoming
allergic to cables too which is not good for an HA enthusiast.

More once I get to the bottom of some of the quirks. You never know, some
of these may be cured by a firmware update. Finger crossed.

Ian




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