Tvix Media Player

[Nathen Paisley]

Overthe last two years, the Korean company DViCO has proven to be a worthwhile player in the media streamer market. The company is now producing its third generation in the TViX family of products: the TViX HD-M4100SH.

Such streamers are touted as a potential competition to the emerging media server market. Simple dedicated boxes, capable of decoding and playing back media files are slowly gaining acceptance and in the future could be very popular if and when producers start to sell HD content for $1/episode, or distribute free HD content over the Internet, embedded with commercials.

The unit is box shaped like the other 4XXX series players, with a front LCD display. The units and introduces quite a few new features over the previous generation of players. First, an HDMI output replaces the aging DVI connector on the older units. This is an HDMI 1.1 output, which means that high rez audio will not play over HDMI. Also new is the support for an internal SATA drive, which replaces the IDE connector on the TViX 4000/5000.

Connecting a drive to the unit is simple and easy, but does require screwing a rail onto the side of the drive. Just plug in the power and the SATA connector, and the drive disappears into the tiny unit.

The graphical user interface is quite similar to that of the previous generation of TViX players. Moving between the local drive and the network drive (NFS using a custom utility and SMB are supported) or the USB external drives (FAT32 and NTFS supported) requires an unintuitive left arrow click on the remote. The company should really address this, as while the unit is quite easy to use after some experience with it, a GUI overhaul is a long time coming.

As always, you must format the hard drive before putting one into the unit, or connect to a computer via the USB host jack and format it from the computer. NTFS format is supported, and with the latest beta software, I was able to play high bit rate (I used VBR content up to 36 Mbps for the test) 1080p content with only an occasional blip or hang-up.

This is more than I can say for all of the computers I have around the house. Just try to play a 1080p MKV/H264 file on them and watch the sweat pour out of the CPU as the fan tries to compensate for the rising heat. No matter how hard I try, a computer costing 3x the cost of this unit still refuses to play such content without stuttering.

To put content on the unit, you can copy using the USB-2 host connection. You can also stream the movies from the network or through USB-2 external drives. I found that higher profile content (VC1/H264/AVC) had a much harder time streaming over the network. While MPEG-2 files played flawlessly over Ethernet at rates of 25 Mbps and upwards, 20 Mbps H264 stuttered repeatedly over the network and even USB-2 external drive. However, on the internal drive, they played just fine. DViCO should really address this if they can, unless it is a hardware limitation of some kind.

A new alternative to taking the unit to the room where the computer is located, is the ability to copy files from the network onto the computer. Vice versa also theoretically works, but only with files that are smaller than 2 GB. Complementing this ability is the delete button the remote, which lets you delete the files you watched and make room for other files.

The 4100 supports the SMB (simple message block) file protocol. In the past, this was too slow to support HD files, so DViCO implemented the NFS (network file system) UNIX remote file system. While this seriously improves performance, it does have the disadvantage of being a non-standard protocol for this type of implementation. Most boxes of this nature (e.g., Snazzio, Ziova, IAMM) now support UP&P as a universal solution for sharing content.

The unit also supports automatic sensing of content that is 50 Hz vs. 60 Hz and can auto switch to the correct output rate. This is a real benefit to users who have, for example, both NTSC and PAL DVDs laying around the house, or even HD content at the various rates. This is one of the biggest benefits of the unit, and the latest beta firmware also supports 24p output over 1080p as well!

The 4100 can pass through AAC and WMA content or decode the front two channels to PCM audio. My receiver is incapable of decoding these two streams, which meant I was limited to stereo sound when watching such content.

A recent firmware updated the unit and added support for the much coveted MKV (Matroska) file format. This file format typically employs the H264 codec and is slowly overthrowing DiVX as the codec of choice over the Internet. This is mostly because of how good the image is, even with very compact file sizes. MKV files originate by either conversion of the original MPEG-2 contents into H264 and into the MKV container, or even as just a container for original H264 files.

The picture quality that the unit outputs is fantastic. High bit rate demo units easily compete with the leading Blu-ray and HD DVD players out there. Scaling wise, DVD content is ok-ish, but you can do better with a good upscaling DVD player.

So, you can take your aging DVD collection and use a ripping program that leaves the entire ISO intact. The result, a file ranging from 3-11GB will contain not just the movie, but will also leave the menus and extras intact.

Finally, in the US and Europe, the 4100 and its waste-paper-basket shaped equivalent the 5100, come with optional tuners for DTV and DVBT. On the 4100, the tiny tuner slips into a matchbox shaped hole on the unit above the fan. On the 5100, the round tuner sits below the unit. While I have not had any experience with these two tuners (sadly, neither DVBT nor DTV is being transmitted in my area), I am told that recording content is quite simple, albeit the unit does lack time based recordings. Recordings can be played back on the unit itself or transported to another unit and played there. The 4100 does not have server software capable of allowing another unit to actively stream contents directly from it.

It took nearly one year since the first Sigma Designs Android STB Demo, but this is not surprising as only 50% of the default Android system can be used in a set-top box and a lot of code must be modified to make it suitable for media players & STBs.

We are pleased to announce that Dvico will unveil Xroid A1, the first multimedia player based on Android OS platform, in CES 2011 held in Las Vegas, US, from January 6th to the 9th.

Mr. Trevor Youn, the team leader and chief developer of this project, will answer all the questions and future supporting functions about the new product at the place, so it could be a good chance to taste a potential item in advance, and you may see some demonstration of Xroid A1 adopting a new Sigma Design 8656 chipset as well.

We hope you are the one of them who experience this new media player at CES 2011.

The problem I can start to see with this kind of devices is that they could almost be replaced by Android tablets such as Archos 70, Archos 101 for people who just want to use them as Media Players. Archos tablets support 1080p HDMI video outputs, play many different video formats and are portable. The only thing missing with tablets is the remote control, but this could be easily fixed with a Bluetooth (or Wi-Fi) remote. I can still see people wanting to have a separate Set-top box for DVR functions and for families. Tvix Xroid A1 will probably have to be well below 300 Euros (without hard disk) to compete in the market place.

DVICO TVIX HD M-7000A is a stylish media player that meets all modern requirements. It has all the features like HDTV playback of transport stream and H.264 files with HDMI output and SATA hard drive support.

It supports various audio/video formats such as MP3, WMA, PCM, DTS, WMV9 and WMV-HD, DIVX, XVid, HDV files recorded by digital video cameras as well as standard transport streams recorded by modern HD devices as well as the new H.264 (MPEG4) format. In a home network environment, it is a versatile media client that can run from network attached storage (NAS) as well as USB devices. The portable DVICO TVIX HD M-7000A features a SATA connection for installing a hard drive and a USB connection for transferring data between your computer and the player. Once saved, the DVICO TVIX HD M-7000A's simple GUI is easy to navigate with the included remote control.

The device offers high-quality HDMI and Component video, as well as S-Video and Composite, allowing connection to all types of displays. Networking capability supports MPEG-2 low and high bitrate LAN video (DVD and HD) as well as optional wireless smart plug (not recommended for high definition 720p / 1080i files). Support for all HDTV formats as well as several PC resolutions allows the DVICO TVIX HD M-7000A to be connected to both HDTV and PC monitors.

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