2011 Media Streamer Roundup : Netgear NTV550, A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD2 and the Boxee Box

Beginning with this review, we are changing the presentation of our media streamer test suite results. We have updated the suite with 3D streams and also added full Blu-ray disc backups in ISO and folder format. The first aspect we will cover is container compatibility. In the tables below, it is evident we have put more stress on Blu-ray ISOs and folder structures compared to DVDs. DVD menu and folder support is pretty mature in almost all media streamers. However, Blu-rays are a different story altogether. New features (such as 3D support) keep getting added to the core specifications. In order to understand the Blu-ray rows in the tables below, we will first look at the different types of Blu-rays in existence.

Blu-ray Profiles

The earliest Blu-rays all conformed to Profile 1.0. These contained the main movie in HD and some optional extra features accessible through the main menu. Starting in November 2007, Profile 1.1 Blu-rays added Bonus View to the mix. These Blu-rays included PiP (Picture-in-Picture) streams. The rise of network enabled Blu-ray players came about due to the introduction of Profile 2.0 Blu-rays which included BD-Live capabilities. With BD-Live, users could watch downloaded content related to the Blu-ray movie (including trailers of upcoming movies from the studios) and also interact with other watchers over the Internet. Local storage is also necessary for Blu-ray players supporting this profile. 3D Blu-rays have started gaining traction over the last couple of years. Despite have a separate profile (Profile 5.0), not all 3D Blu-rays seem to fall under this profile. My general observation has been that Blu-rays which indicate an MVC encoding in their jacket fall under Profile 5.0, but 3D Blu-rays which just indicate AVC tend to not care about the profile supported by the player.

Another irksome aspect of media players supporting BD-Lite or some other similar form of Blu-ray support is the unpredictable behavior of titles with seamless branching. In this case, multiple versions of the movie are spread over multiple M2TS files and different playlists have different orderings set up to represent the multiple versions.

The table below summarizes our Blu-ray test suite:

The entire test suite was run off a hard disk connected directly to the streamer. For the A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD2, this disk was put in the internal slot. For the Netgear NeoTV 550, we connected the disk over eSATA. For the Boxee Box, the disk was conenected as an external USB drive.