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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ganeshts - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
dumbletore,WTV and DVR-MS are already in our test suite.
We will make sure the following is in our reviews:
(1) Support for WTV and DVR-MS containers
s44 - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
The LG BD390 has been discontinued and unavailable for months now. At this point we should be looking at the LG BD570/590 or the Samsung C5500/6500.Hubble70 - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
Yes please. My parent's LG590 freezes up on them and they are pissed. If you did a review maybe it would whip them into shape and deliver a decent firmware.Decaff - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
Another thing I believe you should add to the list is DLNA support. It offers some neat capabilities in controlling your setup from a PC.Also, be sure yo check the audio and video quality, as I have heard rumors of some players not displaying a proper picture (Xbox for example).
Furthermore, I think you should pay special attention to the interface of the media streamer, as it has to be easy to navigate, even if you have a thousand movies stored on your NAS.
ganeshts - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
Decaff, Definitely!WDTV Live is DLNA 1.5 certified. So, we will definitely test similar capabilities for other media streamers that we review.
Points to note from your comment for our reviews:
(1) DLNA Support
(2) Quality of User Interface
hughlle - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
erm, "as is its wont"that makes no sense to me, although granted i'm just out of bed.
clarkn0va - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
http://www.google.ca/search?rlz=1C1GPCK_enCA378CA3...Does that help?
genzai - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
It would be very helpful to me (and i think many other readers) who have extensive libraries ripped (by for instance handbrake) into "iDevice" compatible formats, such as the appleTV, iphone etc. Though these files are essentially a form of h264 in a .m4v (quicktime?) wrapper i have found in my own limited testing that they rarely work on non "iDevices". When we are considering moving away from the appleTV or extending our iPod video library to one of these new feature rich players, it would be very good to know whether we would be looking at re-encoding our entire libraries, or if a device will support the .m4v files.Thanks,
g\
ganeshts - Tuesday, June 15, 2010 - link
genzai, Thanks for your very good suggestion.We will take the following point for our reviews:
(1) Support for M4V container
SlyNine - Monday, June 14, 2010 - link
I use the WD Live and Twonky to host HD movies, Series, Music. Twonky does a great job of organizing my music but I wish the interface was more customizable ( and maybe it is, I haven't played around with it much).WD Live may not be the most powerful, But its fast enough to play 40 mbps .264/VC1 movies with DTS or DD, I also think it can support DTS HD, but TrueHD seems to be lacking. Like Twonky, the interface could use a little work, but it's plenty usable.
I use 4 TB worth of harddrive space and for my series DVD's, I just use handbreak and reencode them ( thank god for the Core I7).