ASRock's High-End Vision 3D HTPC Reviewed
by Ganesh T S on October 3, 2010 10:20 AM EST
We have been using our media streamer test suite for the last few reviews in the HTPC / media streamer space. In v1.0.1 of the test suite used in the WDTV Live Plus review, we added DVD and Blu-Ray folder structures to the mix. In v1.0.2, we have added three Xvid clips (one with Q-Pel, and two others with GMC (Global Motion Compensation) using 2 and 3 warp points respectively) and a MKV stream with forced subtitles. For the Vision 3D, we used v1.0.2 of the media streamer test suite. Weights have been assigned to each of the test stream based on how frequently one might encounter each type of file in a home theater setting.
We now have 50 streams in our test suite and a maximum possible score of 350. Presenting a table listing every stream would make this section messy. Instead, moving forward, we will only indicate streams which have playback issues. In addition to that, for HTPCs, we will also indicate all the different softwares / codecs used to enable playback of all the test streams.
The Vision 3D is the first pre-built HTPC we have reviewed to score a perfect 100% in our media streamer test suite. However, this was not quite straightforward, as it was quite difficult to find the correct splitter / filter / renderer combinations for some of the test streams. The following softwares were used to process our media streamer test suite:
- Cyberlink PowerDVD 10.0.2025.52 OEM 3D
- MPC-HC x64 1.4.2499 with ffdshow Audio Decoder (x64 SVN 3572)
- VLC 1.1.4
- Monogram GraphStudio with MPC-HC Matroska Splitter (for 024-1080p24.x264.DTS-MA.7Ch.mkv, which had minor stutters with the default MPC-HC combination used to playback other streams)
- Monogram GraphStudio with Sage Mpeg Demux Splitter (for 042-1080p24.VC1.TrueHD.AC3, which the latest MPC-HC M2TS splitter couldn't split properly. VLC could play this back without bitstreaming, but GraphStudio, with the Sage splitter was able to properly deliver the TrueHD soundtrack to ffdshow for bitstreaming).
3D Playback
Vision 3D's claim to fame is the enabling of 3D Blu-Ray playback with HDMI 1.4a output. However, 3D technology equipment is pretty high-end even for us reviewers. However, that would be no excuse to not test it out, right?! Thankfully, Tom Vaughan from Cyberlink invited me over to Cyberlink's office in Fremont, CA to make use of their demo equipment (3D TV / AV receiver). With the Vision 3D in hand, I landed up over there at 8 AM one morning, and proceeded to test out 3D Blu-Ray playback with the Vision 3D using the OEM PowerDVD version supplied by ASRock. I was also quite surprised that PowerDVD was able to correctly identify stereoscopic WMV files and play them back appropriately on the 3D TV.
Tom also gave us some useful insights on 3D technology and how Cyberlink is gearing up to handle the upcoming challenges in the HTPC area, but those are details for another day and another article. We are grateful to Tom and Cyberlink for providing us with the opportunity to make use of their facilities.
Refresh Rate Handling
Many HTPC purists are concerned about the lack of support for proper display refresh rates. This was one of the main drawbacks of the Core 100 reviewed earlier. The Vision 3D, with nV's 260.66 drivers, has no such issues. This can be observed from the following screenshots. MPC-HC's statistics OSD indicates that the display correctly refreshes at 23.976 Hz with the 23 Hz setting for Vision 3D, while Core 100 indicates a refresh rate of 23.999 Hz for the 23 Hz setting.
23 Hz Setting on Core 100 / Vision 3D (Click to enlarge)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
ganeshts - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
Thanks, fixed :)nitrousoxide - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
A Seagate Barracuda Momentus XT 500GB would do much better job than WD Scorpio Black.LtGoonRush - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
A Seagate Momentus XT 500GB would cost nearly twice as much as the WD Scorpio Black 500GB ($130 vs $75 at retail), and the performance difference is rather unimpressive. In the tests where the Seagate can make use of its SLC cache it can take the lead, but in most tests the Scorpio Black is faster, especially when seek times or write performance come into play, since those are Seagate's major weaknesses.BansheeX - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
Cool box but LOL at the THX logo being slapped on it. They used to put that on heavily compressed DVD mixes, not all of them good either. Consumers don't care anymore.ganeshts - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
Personally, I don't care too much about the THX either :) If you are using HDMI for audio, it doesn't even appear in the picture.The internal audio codec is advertised with THX, so the HTPC using it gets the additional marketing point too :)
tobrien - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
you guys did such an excellent job with this review! thanks for all the hard work and effort you guys put in!Shiitaki - Sunday, October 3, 2010 - link
I'm not seeing the value here. A thousand dollars to stream content, and play blurays? One of the previous replies you stated that there was no native bluray support for the mac mini, true. And there is for a machine running windows? Tacking on Cyberlink is not native support.That is way too much hardware for what it does, which illustrates how badly Windows is for a platform. You could do much better with less hardware. Which is the real problem with a htpc, the software, the operating system, and various codecs, and getting it to all work together. Too much complexity. Most of the processor is wasted on layers of software instead of doing actual work. Most of the effort is expended to compensate for lazy and inadequate programming, as well as DRM.
I understand the concept, I had a htpc for a couple of years, but after the frustration of trying to get surround sound to work in Cyberlink for Blurays, and the tech support to keep Windows working, I gave up. In fact it was specifically windows deciding to rebuild my music library from scratch every time I opened media center to play music. I want an appliance on the other end of the remote, having to search forums and break out a mouse and keyboard to trouble shoot something that worked the day before just fine should not be step two after pressing the power button.
In the the article, there is no details as to how much or little work it took to make the software environment to work. Did settings hold, did you have to do reconfigurations, update drivers, load codecs? I seriously doubt it worked out of the box. Working out of the box is the great failure of the pc industry. On the video quality you are hedging, saying that video quality will get better with driver updates? So it's not finished eh? That's the sad reality with the computer industry in general, nothing ships as a finished product.
The only thing this device seems to offer are endless possibilities to reward owners with a sense of accomplishment having solved issues preventing operations promised by the vendor. You can buy a nice bluray player, wd live, and still have 700 dollars for something else.
The real news is if you took it out of the box, plugged everything in, did a setup once, and spent the rest of the time using it. No drivers, patches, settings that reset themselves, or promises of a future update for something to work So what did it take to make it work like it's supposed to, what issues does it have? Did you listen to two channel, or full surround? How many error messages did you have to deal with?
ganeshts - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
What you are looking for is a player like the upcoming Netgear NTV550. That would put it in the media streamer section. That would be like $700 cheaper than the Vision 3D, but, with the NTV choice, you are at the mercy of Netgear for firmware updates in case something you want doesn't work, and it also doesn't support 3D -- which is what this product is targeted towards.. For the Vision 3D running Windows, you have a number of open source developers who can enable core features like HD audio bitstreaming etc. -- Try getting open source devs to get those sort of features working on a SoC based device.The fact with the HTPC scene is that you do have to do some setup of sorts and deal with error messages and what no. However, sometimes, slapping on the latest XBMC build solves most problems. Our test suite is designed to give problems to various softwares, so deriding drivers / softwares on the basis of the difficulty in getting it to work is not the purpose of the review.
ggathagan - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Everything you state is true but, unfortunately, that can be said of computers in general. It's not limited to HTPC.You're also missing one of the major points of the HTPC: Its ability as a computer.
You don't get that from a standalone device.
You don't specify what version of MCE you were using, but if you weren't using the Windows 7 version it's not really a valid arguement.
I never tried the Vista version, but the Win 7 version has certainly come a looong way from the XP version.
And if you happen to be someone on a budget that wants to do it all with a single device, the price of the ASRock system is pretty attractive, even after adding the cost of the OS, monitor and BD software.
Hrel - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Pretty sure the hybrid Seagate Momentus XT is the fastest 2.5" drive they could have chosen. To all the other people talking about this egregious error, WD and Seagate are the only mechanical disk hard drive manufacturer's even worth looking at.