Personally I am put off the mede8ber because they are hesitant to release a patch for it and are rather blaming the people who create the formats. IMHO, it's in their interest to support as many different types of formats as possible. They should welcome the opportunity to make their player better than others. I will be creating my own movies from DVD's that I own so it does not effect me but its about the principle. I would like the player that I buy to support additional formats in the future should they come available.
I think what people are misunderstanding is that in part
RealTek is to be blamed for a lot of these issues. SDK3 has some big flaws and so mede8er decided to go to SDK4. That is why they are ahead of so many other players with V4. Still though SDK4 is giving the developers a lot of problems. The question I guess is do you concentrate efforts on an interim fix that affect say maybe 5% of your customers at this stage or do you concentrate on providing the functionality that 95% of your users will find more useful. The mede8er's in my house gets used at least 3 hours a day, 7 day a week, 365 days a year and plays all sorts of formats. So I guess the big question for all these people is try and make small gains or try and make big gains.
Do any of these media players give a preview of the movie as a thumbnail or allow a image as the thumbnail? I am looking to get one for my kids to use (eldest is 7 years) so it will certainly help having a picture for them to choose.
Yes they do. There is various ways of doing this and various software that you can use to scrape the information from the internet. If you look at this movie then you will see what most of these players can do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4TvuYdnD4c
Ignoring the mede8er because you seem really stocked about it. Why do you put the AC Ryan > WD > Compro. What is the benefit of the AC Ryan over the other two and the benefit of the WD over the Compro?
Nothing except the overall experience. It is sometimes small thing like the new mede8er remote is 10x better than the old mede8er remote. But that is very subjective but at least I used all of them before. All of them has got little things that are better/worst against the others. So imho ppl can buy any of them. My current media player line-up included mede8er med500x, mede8er med400x mini, ac ryan play!on hd (going to get donated to a family member now) and then a htpc using xbmc live.
I concur it looks like I was pushing for the AC Ryan, but I wasn't so much pushing for the AC Ryan as using it as a comparison. You notice I would personally go for the WD TV Live? Think it is miles ahead of both players, but then again, I don't like having a hard-drive in my media player (because I already have a NAS).
Could not agree more about the HDD. That is why I always disable the fans in these players because I never put a hdd in.
And I hold strong that problem isn't hot air or rarely seen. I have many files that won't play. If you are in Pretoria, I can PM you my address, swing by and I'll copy you 100+ HD movies that I guarantee won't play. My brother and guys he works with have a dedicated download box and they ONLY download 1080p and only 720p if the 1080p isn't available (roughly 7gb per movie). I regularly get movies from him, and the amount that don't play on ANY of him or his friends media players is staggering
Not in Pretoria but Jozi but won't mind driving through to come and get the movies
so please pm me your details. Like I said I have a fair collection of 1080p and 720p done as mkv without any problems. So it would be nice to see this and compare it to xbmc and some other players.
That was the reason I pushed for the AC Ryan instead of the Mede8er. The attitude from the developers are: What can I do to make my clients happy. Mede8er: Let's blame everyone else
Guys,
I think I have good news.
As you know the Mede8er devs are working on a new release, and that includes rolling to a new Realtek SDK to solve the audio issues that are in V4beta4. Have seen some test versions that are not ready for (beta) release yet, but the good new is, these versions seems to be able to play header compressed mkv files.
So hold on, I expect some better solution then remuxing we currently have.
regards,
The problem is that yes there is some people on mede8er forums that just grumpy and make stupid remarks but most of them are not affiliated with mede8er. In general the guys do listen and do keep track of bugs and try to fix as many of them. AC Ryan clearly states that they
IMPROVED comparability with header compression so by no means have they fixed it. The fix needs to come at SDK level. The biggest mistake I think the mede8er people are making though is to be very unclear about the next firmware releases. They only state:
I am going to repeat all again for the benefit of those who did not read the earlier comments about V4 update. We could not continue with fixing core bugs in V4 as these were deep in the SDK and totally out of our control. We have been waiting for a updated SDK from Realtek in order to merge our code and continue. This was received a few weeks ago and our engineers are busy with it. We are hoping to release a updated Beta on the old SDK as a short term measure within the next few days. We don’t know the exact timing of the v4 on the new SDK and I would imagine it would be ready within weeks.
but then again I'm a fanboy although I at least own/owned a lot of other players but I'm a fan of the mede8er because it does work brilliantly.
Unfortunately it uses RAID-z so accessing the data while the system is down is going to be a bit difficult.
