Updates on the Netgear NTV 550

It was always the NTV 550's local media playback specifications that had everyone enthused. Netflix or no Netflix, if the NTV 550 managed to playback the users' local media files and Blu-Ray ISOs with full menu support, I am quite sure a majority of the users would have been quite happy. Prior to talking with Netgear today morning, I put the 325NA firmware version through our full test suite. Though playback capability had improved compared to previous firmware versions, it was clear that the product was still far away from being ready for prime time. I filed a list of bugs and linked Netgear to the sample streams for the bugs. A summary of the reported issues is reproduced below. In case you are planning to purchase a NTV 550 in the next few weeks and have media streams fitting the following criteria, do not be surprised if they fail to play back in a satisfactory manner.

1. WMA / WMAPro decode (when set to PCM in the Audio menu) is not multi-channel. The AV receiver sees only 2 channel PCM.
2. When the 'Aspect Ratio' is set to 'Auto' in the setup menu, the output doesn't obey the aspect ratio information in the container. However, this is not a serious issue, since it is always possible to change the aspect ratio with a few key presses when the video is being played.
3. Some TrueHD soundtracks in M2TS containers sends static to the AV receiver
4. Many test streams with AAC audio play back blank or corrupted video. Multi-channel AAC decoding to multi-channel LPCM appears broken in some test streams.
5. There is no support for Vorbis / ADPCM audio tracks.
6. SRT subtitles with foreign languages (such as Arabic, Thai, Hindi etc.) don't display properly. Experimenting with various settings for subtitle encoding didn't seem to help much.
7. TrueHD audio track in some MKVs hang playback
8. The M2TS splitter in the NTV 550 seems to be based on ffmpeg and has an issue affecting some other Sigma Designs SoC based streamers such as the WDTV series also. More details are available in this link. I haven't seen this issue in any Realtek streamer so far.
9. Playback of MKVs with VC1 video tracks is not reliable. Some stutter (reproducible consistently), while others hang after playing back a few frames.
10. Forced PGS subtitles in MKV are not forced. The user has to manually open up the Subtitle track selector popup and choose the 'Forced' track. It is only logical that forced subtitles be on by default.
11. Some streams exhibit pinkish / discoloured video on playback, but these are not consistently reproducible.
12. Dolby Digital Plus bitstreaming is bitstreamed as Dolby Digital with dropouts in some cases, even though the information about the clip in the NTV 550 interface indicates it to be DD+.
13. TRP and WTV extensions are not recognized. MOV compatibility is a bit flaky. FLVs with H264 streams are also not recognized.
14. Some 3D Blu-Ray ISOs created with AnyDVD HD hang after playing the first title. Only recourse to get the player back in business was to eject the ISO.

The above issues are relevant to streams which I expected the NTV 550 to play back. There are other Real Media streams, MPEG 4 streams with multiple warp points etc. which are not supported by the Sigma SoC and hence don't play back. I don't consider these as negative aspects of the firmware. I have also not touched upon UI quirks, networking performance and other such aspects in this section. They will be covered in the final review.