Auvisio True Vision 1080p

June 27, 2009

Auvisio True Vision 1080p

Since the WD TV most likely won’t ever support idx/subs properly and Asus does have no clue when the O!Play HDP-R1 will be available in Germany, I’m still checking out other devices despite their quite ugly (apparantly generic) design.

Auvisio GUI

From the looks of GUI and menus (a puny 16 chars max, why don’t they do it like Xtreamer?) it would appear the Auvisio is equipped with the same (Realtek 128X?) chip as the Antarius, with no DTS downmix but quite an impressive feature list given it’s price tag of 99,- Euros:

  • LAN support (no WLAN)
  • full DVD menu support (ISOs/VOBs)
  • USB hub support
  • HDD support > 1 TB (1.5 TB Maxtor drive worked flawlessly)
  • pretty much every HD trailer I’ve tried played back fine

However, contrary to the Antarius there’s no setting to turn off the annoying video preview. So I mailed Pearl, the mail-order company that sells Auvisio, to ask about any upcoming firmware updates that might fix this flaw but apparently the manufactury does offer

no end user customer support!

As confirmed by the Pearl hotline, the Asian manufacturer does not deal with end users ever. So if you’ve got any problems with/suggestions about their product you can mail the retailer who will pass them on eventually but you won’t get any feedback. If it’s commercially viable the manufacturer might release an update but don’t count on it.

Sorry, but I won’t support any company that out of touch with it’s customers. Next!

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Posted by Marvin

Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes

June 16, 2009

I’ve just read these interesting examples of flawed tech over at Technologizer.com who ask the very same question I keep asking myself whenever I come across unexpected and pointless flaws in consumer electronics devices: “What were they thinking?” Sadly, it would appear that common sense and best practice are still unheard of in 2009 in certain design/engineer circles.

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Posted by Marvin

Trekstor MovieStation Antarius

June 15, 2009

Trekstor Antarius

Just popping in for a brief review of the Trekstor Antarius I’ve borrowed from a friend for a couple of days.  Similar to the WD TV DVD menus are ignored but as it recognizes VOBs < 30 mins and ISOs < 40 mins and allows the user to select each title of these files via the remote, watching episodic shows and music DVDs is possible. Although it’s still gonna take me some time to jump on the HD bandwagon my next mediaplayer is bound to have HD support, however despite being advertized as such, the Antarius falls short of that category cause as of firmware 1.26 there’s

no H.264 support.

When pressing play on some trailers resulted in “invalid file” I re-checked homepage and manual and indeed, somewhere in the fineprint it says that MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP (xvid/divx) is supported up to 1080p but not MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC  (H.264) which means that pretty much every mkv out there won’t play back. Epic fail.

OTOH I don’t feel to bad about skipping this device cause I think both design and UI suck and it comes with further flaws (YMMV), some of which might get fixed by an upcoming firmware:

  • due to a pointless preview window on the right side of the screen the file browser is limited to a puny 16 (!) chars with painfully slow scrolling (yes, it’s even slower than my old Panasonic’s display)
17 chars

file browser: 16 chars max

  • the remote’s NEXT does not skip to the next song but goes PAGE DOWN (thanks for breaking usability)
  • no shuffle play (and as a matter of fact even no continuous play in folders unless you switch to music mode and select “repeat all”)
  • m3u playlist selection
  • some ID3 v2.3 tags don’t work (no time for further testing)
  • after file copy is done (you can’t write on FAT32 but only NTFS drives!) you’ll end up at root dir instead of the dirs you were in
  • on -> standby -> no power -> power -> on (instead of standby)
  • with some idx/sub only every other item is shown
  • no srt font size selection so word wrap does not work properly with some subs

Next up for testing are EGreat EG-M34A, Xtreamer and Asus O!Play HDP-R1 (I’m not kidding, that’s the name!), whichever is available in Germany first.

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Posted by Marvin