Micca Slim-HD: 1080p In Your Pocket
by Vivek Gowri on November 23, 2010 1:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Micca
- Slim-HD
- Media Player
Micca Slim-HD - The Works
The Slim-HD is based around the Boxchip F10, a new for 2010 SoC that’s pretty mysterious, all things considered. It’s based around the SoChip SC9800, which is another high-end PMP media player SoC. You can see a block diagram of the SC9800’s microarchitecture below.
But beyond the SC9800 base, not too much is known about the F10. We don’t have a clockspeed or anything else really - no datasheets to be found, no nothing. We do know that it has full 7.1 downmix capability along with performance roughly on par with the old Realtek 1073 series of SoCs. We expect it to be less powerful than most dedicated media streamer SoCs like the upcoming Realtek 10x5 and current Sigma 864x and 865x lines.
Further analysis of the Slim-HD logic board shows that it has a Samsung 512MB DDR SDRAM chip and a 2GB Hynix NAND chip. There is also an Analogix CoolHD ANX7150 HDMI transmitter, along with a JMicron high-speed USB-SATA bridge to make the connector side of things work.
We should note here that the WD TV Live Plus has the Sigma 8654 media processor inside, but also has a pretty beefy heatsink. Passively cooled, yes, but the Slim-HD does that one better by not having a cooling system. The SoC is just...there. No heatsinks, no vents, and definitely no fans. This was probably done in the interest of portability, and it seems to have paid off for Micca, given the size difference between the Slim-HD and the WD TV. Even without a real cooling mechanism, the Slim-HD is completely stable and doesn't heat up much at all, even during our strenuous test bench, which really points to the low power consumption of the F10 SoC.
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abrar - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
i noticed that there is a Firmware download link on the Micca website, have you tested it ?and if so , have you noticed an appreciable difference ?!
jack@micca - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I believe the test unit already has the latest firmware. We do release new firmware frequently, however, and hope to improve handling of less-than-popular encoding methods and parameters.Jack
blowfish - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
The look of the UI would be the least important aspect of any media player. I'm far more interested in media compatibility, so thanks for doing a throrough job on that. x264 support is high on my list of priorities. Personally, I have no interest in streaming media.The Slim-HD seems like a handy device to hook up to an hotel TV when you're traveling.
Rainman200 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Couldn't disagree more with you on that, the GUI is supremely important which is why Apple trounces many of their competitors.For far too long media players have had very poor GUI's designed by people with no UI experience or training at all. See the stock skin of the Realtek RTD1073 players.
Shouldn't have to be that way, we can have both.
jack@micca - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
I agree with you that the GUI is important. And to that point, I would say that the Slim-HD's GUI while not pretty, is functional, simple, and responsive. Sure it doesn't have fancy transitions, a movie jukebox interface, or movie cover-art/info displays. But if you take a look at the modern digital media player with such fancy interfaces, they are either very expensive, and/or have a lot of bugs.I am not saying a nice interface is impossible, but industry as a whole is searching for an efficient way to present the massive video collections that users have in some coherent user friendly fashion.
For us, usability is still the main focus for now. Future firmware versions will add a bit of eye candy to the various pages. But we will control such changes so as not to impact usability.
Jack
WingNutZA - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Does the player need external AC power when you hook it up to a PC as a storage device or can USB supply enough power when you only want to copy stuff to/from the unit?jack@micca - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
No AC power is needed as this works as USB hard drive while drawing all the power it needs from the computer's USB port.Jack
mfeller2 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
I checked the docs, and there is not the ability to copy files from an SD card to the hard drive. It should be a simple software change to add this functionality, and adds flexibility to let Micca address a different market. There are products for in-the-field backup for digital cameras. Plug in the media card to a portable hard drive, and media card contents are automatically copied to disk, to have a second copy in the case of media card failure. Smaller than a laptop when there are packing constraints (photo-journalism, nature photography). With newer digital cameras now supporting video, the ability to do this in-the-field backup, and then do playback from the Micca drive...it's a nice all-in-one package that does more than the dedicated photo-backup hardware, and cheaper to boot.Rainman200 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
The sochip SC9800 is definitely Arm based as there is a Chinese forum that deals with it used by Ainol players and someone hacked Android onto one of the PMP'sIf the rumors are true the Boxchip F10 is supposedly the same although why the different names is a mystery.
Pooki - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
I'd like to pick up the micca slim hd and pair it with a boxee remote. Combined, that's about the price of an AppleTV. Would it work, you reckon?