Media Streamer Platforms Roundup
by Ganesh T S on June 13, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Media Streamer
- Gadgets
A majority of the consumers in this market have been spoilt for choices since they come from a HTPC background, and stress their media streamers to the limit (even beyond the officially supported specifications). Sometimes, they are pleasantly surprised by some available unadvertised feature (like the TrueHD bitstreaming in WDTV Live, which wasn't part of the initial specifications). Most of time, though, various limitations start showing up, both in terms of hardware capabilities and software support. These are dealt with in the reviews of the individual products. The end consumer needs to look at his requirements before choosing a media streamer. In addition, reviews on the net should cater to what the market really wants, and not rehash the marketing speak from the companies. Anandtech is working on creating a comprehensive suite of test streams to identify the capabilities as well as shortcomings of the various media streamer platforms. Towards this, we have identified the following features which differentiate the various platforms, both from a hardware as well as software perspective.
- Audio & video container support (MKV / MP4 / MOV / AVI / FLV / WebM etc.)
- Video codecs (H264 / VC-1 / Real Media / VP8 etc.)
- Audio codecs (Dolby / DTS / FLAC / Ogg Vorbis / WMA Pro / HD Audio - Decoding / Bitstreaming)
- Multiple subtitle formats
- Interlaced video streams in different codecs
- Specific video & audio codec quirks (such as weighted P-frame prediction & unreasonable number of reference frames for H264)
- Maximum video & audio bitrate
- Maximum video frame rate
Readers are welcome to suggest other aspects which need to be added to this test suite.
While this roundup article may not have an analytical conclusion, I will bring it to a close by listing out the platforms which we will closely follow in the coming days with respect to the above features:
- Atom + Ion / Ion2 [ x86 + Nvidia custom HD decode engine ]
- Mediatek 8520 Series [ ARM11 + Mediatek custom HD decode engine ]
- Sigma Designs 86xx Series [ MIPS + Sigma Designs custom HD decode engine ]
- Realtek 1073/1283 Series [ MIPS + Realtek custom HD decode engine ]
- Nvidia Tegra2 [ ARM Cortex-A9 + Nvidia low power custom HD decode engine ]
- Samsung S5PV210 [ ARM Cortex-A8 + Samsung low power custom HD decode engine ]
- Telechips TCC89xx [ ARM11 + Chips&Media Boda series HD decode engine ]
- Intel CE4100 [ x86 + Intel custom HD decode engine ]
Stay tuned for exclusive analysis of the capabilities of each of the above platforms from Anandtech in the near future!
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ruzveh - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
I forgot to mention USB3 & SATA3 support along with bluetooth3 & new giga connectionbatmanuel - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
I found the PS3 a little to easily dismissed in this discussion. Yes, the power draw is much higher than a pure media streaming product, but for me the convenience of having one device for games, Blu-Rays, Netflix, and local file streaming outweighs the extra little hit on my power bill. I've also found the PS3 Media Streamer software to greatly increase the usefulness of the PS3 for streaming, since on a reasonably up-to-date computer it can transcode just about any file format, including 1080p MKVs, into a stream the PS3 can decode.Similarly, not mentioning the Media Center Extender capabilities of the 360 also does it a great disservice. It seems like a power drain was used as too big a criteria, when it honestly doesn't cross my mind when selecting home theater equipment. I'm fairly sure the power drain of my PS3 isn't quite that big when you compare it to the drain of the HDTV,surround receiver, and TiVo (withe external hard drive) combined.
ganeshts - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
Both PS3 and XBox are good media players, and PS3 has some great features such as bitstreaming.However, the intent of the article was not to cover all-in-one platforms in great detail.
In our gaming platform reviews, we will also touch upon the media capabilities.
ruzveh - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - link
My friend PS3 is good but it lacks file format support by way big margin and todays codec r suppose to accelerate power from cpu and graphics card for better smoother experience. but still PS3 has many things lacking..I forgot to mention that media streamers can come equipped with some game emulators to play on our HDTV like this product "multimedia-mp6-player-sound-system-and-game-console" on chinavasionDotCom
balancebox - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
max reframe rate for 1080p h.264/x264 mkv playback should be testedI purchased an asus o player air recently it plays 720p fine even with 10 reframes but for 1080p it is having problems with 10 reframes, 5 reframes plays fine
its probably do to hardware memory limitation. I would like to confirm if the WD TV Live can play 1080p with 16 reframes with video "planet earth from pole to pole 1080p"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQdSLOhrVMc#t=4m19s <--- this video says it can but being youtube it isn't reliable
also WD TV have a larger linux modding community than asus o player =(
ganeshts - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
balancebox,This is definitely a part of our test suite (The 16 reframe video is one of the files). That said, almost all modern chipsets can handle 16 reframe (32 reframe for interlaced H264).
Personally, I can confirm for you that WDTV Live indeed plays the 16 reframe Planet Earth sample, but only if it is off the local hard disk connected to USB. It doesn't play well over wired ethernet.
I will include the following in our reviews:
(1) Homebrew firmware / community development support
NeBlackCat - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
Excellent article and follow up, once again showing why AT is in a class of it's own. Really looking forward to the next instalment!One major (imho) omission though, and it's very important to many people - the extent to which software is open and has active third party development. This keeps the bug count down and feature count up, promotes choice and innovation, makes your investment go further, and gives you a whole new way to have fun if you're a hacker. Ask Dreambox owners.
For example, you could categorise each as:
Closed: runs manufacturer software only, or perhaps semi-FLOSS (eg. Linux plus a proprietary manufacturer SDK that is closed, buggy and feature limited - are you listening Realtek/Sigma?).
Customisable: mainly closed, but has been hacked in a limited way, allowing some end user customisation (eg. NMTs and their plugins and customisable UIs)
Hackable: not fully open, but has been hacked enough to make most things possible, even complete firmware replacements.
Open: anything goes - IONs, Dreamboxes, etc.
NeBlackCat - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
> (1) Homebrew firmware / community development supportBah, that'll teach me to not hit the post button quick enough!
Colin1497 - Saturday, June 19, 2010 - link
Seems like a pretty big oversight. I stream from my PC and Netflix on my S3 TiVo quite a lot.scJohn - Saturday, June 19, 2010 - link
I found this site useful for audio test clips: http://www.demo-world.eu/trailers/high-definition-... . Scroll down to see the Dolby, DTD and THX sections. I used the audio clips to see what audio the WD Live would pass thru to my A/V receiver.When testing a wired/wireless connection a lot of times a short clip (< 3-minutes) will play fine but when you try and stream a 2 hour movie all kinds of problems seem to crop up. I guess I'm recommending that your test suite have a good selection of run times.
Another area that needs to be addressed is filmware updates. Does the company have a good history on updates? Not sure how one would about assigning a grade to a company in this matter. Also, what problems, uprgades, etc. can a company do on it's own and what a company is dependent upon the chip manufacturer's SDK.