I don't think playlists are supported, but I can't remember exactly what I tried before my lim finally died. It might be possible to make (by hand) an .m3u file containing a list of files to play, then throw that on the lim and see what happens when you click on it. Getting the paths in the .m3u to be what the limHD expects is the tough part. Hopefully paths relative to the .m3u would work OK.

m3u is for playing mp3 files, right, not to play mpeg, right?

Perry

Originally, yeah, but it's logical to think that an AV media player might handle any supported format. I'm not aware of a cross-platform playlist file format specifically for video files...

OK, I will give it a try. Thanks for the hint. I will report back if I can.

Perry

Ok. I'm yet another disillusioned user.

I got my limHD200i because I was told at the time it was the best for MKVs.

It does seem to play them ok but it's useless for just about everything else :(

What would people recommend as a replacement for my new doorstop.

Be sure not to listen to those who recommended you buy the limhd200i this time around.

I would agree with the previous post...unfortunately.

There was a time when I thought Tomacro could establish themselves as a credible player, which would have been good for the consumer too. However, since then, they have wasted (blown?) their chance, upset a lot of people by completely ignoring their requests for new firmware (I count myself one of these people), and now have been made completely redundant by the new wave of NMT based players.

So, where does that leave the new Limhd310s?......down the same path from what I can see.

Having said all that...still using mine for MKV,TS, MP3 playback etc (although DTS WAVE files seem to have stopped working now for no reason?!!!! (static noise)). Time for a NMT, just cant decide which one! (new eGreat M31B or the B-110...)

K

OldP, you tried man...
Sure lot of people appreciated that...

Better next time :-)
If you want BD, check the new HDI... :-)
(IFA is currently showing BD on TviX even...) from HDD with menus and all)
Syabas likely to respond sooner or later for the NMT's now...

OldP, you tried man...
Sure lot of people appreciated that...

Better next time :-)
If you want BD, check the new HDI... :-)
(IFA is currently showing BD on TviX even...) from HDD with menus and all)
Syabas likely to respond sooner or later for the NMT's now...

Must admit...the HDI looks promising!

K

But it plays m2ts directly; why the need to convert to MKV?

I love to convert original m2ts to MKV or TS to save space.

28GB down to 5.0GB and still at 1080p DTS/AC3 sound and no loss in picture, why not?

Matter of fact limHD310s latest firmware has a surprise performance

See it here:
http://www.datoptic.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=14

It decodes DTS-HD to DTS-core on fly. I don't think any of the HD media players out there can do this

I have to admit Tomacro limHD200s is not a good unit; I gave this limHD200s to my brother :-)

Check it out the new liimHD310s, you won't be disappointed of playing H.264 coded file specially M2TS with DTS-HD audio

My LimHD has given up on the sound via HDMI all of a sudden. Any idea why? and How to fix this? Is it hardware problem or software? I was able to play sounds from RCA cable, I have also tested the HDMI cable with my Camcorder, no problem. Any idea? Thanks for your help.

Perry

You might need to restore factory defaults to get the HDMI audio back. But if you get this message, your only hope is to upgrade...

Sorry!! HDMI audio feature did expire - to keep enjoy splendid digital life, buy limHD310s immediatly!
Just kidding...

Mark,
I was afraid of that. I did try restore factory defaults, no help. I also reinstall the updates, no help. I am pluging-in my HDMI to get the video, but then, RCA to get the audio. Pain! I don't think I can trust to send this unit to Tomacro, I will probably not get it back! OR have to pay $$$ for the repair. It is very strange, all of a sudden, no sound! I checked the connections, looks ok. I tried other cable, it is fine.

Perry

Mark,
I did what you suggested, and looks like, the HDMI video output is gone as well now. I can not get the video to come up at all! May be you are not joking about the expiration at all? Any other thoughts? Is there a hard reset button? BTW, since then, I tried to reinstall an other version, BAK app & App... no help. In fact, for some reason, the version # at the bottom did not change after the downgrade. Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Perry

Hi all,

I've had my limHD200i now over a month and it's just about managing to serve its (current) purpose.

For a while I was looking for a Media Centre that I could put all my DVD ISOs onto, stick it under my TV and sling all my DVDs in the loft. For that purpose it is working fine. I bought the limHD200i after a couple of Google searches brought me to this forum thread, however I read the thread from the wrong end. At the start of this thread, things looked rosy, Tomacro seemed to be releasing firmware updates on a regular basis on the requests of users from this thread.

Before reading too deep into the thread (i.e. before everything turned to crap and Tomacro stuck their heads in the sand), I spotted one going cheap on eBay from Only Best Rated. I jumped in and managed to get it for about £60. I did this without knowing the postage cost (£45) and then OBR sent it with the follow line on the dispatch note to UPS: "Please charge the customer all applicable duties". Thanks for that OBR, another £57 import duty! It also arrived with a SATA connector, when everything seems to state that it is IDE. So once I sent my 750GB IDE drive back and replaced it with a SATA one, my limDH200i was up and running for around £200.

Since then I've chucked countless DVD ISOs onto it and it handles them fine and it's doing exactly what I bought it for.

However, the box is supposed to be capable of so much more and this seems to be where it falls on it's arse.

HD looks fine (I tested it with rip of Casino Royal), but playing anything other than an ISO file has crap movie navigation. I've tried numerous different file types and they all seem to have the following problems:
Can't rewind (Fast forward upto x32 works fine).
Can't skip chapters forwards or backwards (it seems to skip to the next/previous file on the HD).
Resuming from pause sometimes crashes the box.

I've seen some comments on this forum stating that it handles MKV files fine, but I get all of the above navigation problems. Am I generating my MKVs correct (I used Handbreak)?

The above navigation problems don't happen with DVD ISOs, however with ISOs there's no running/remaining time or any way to jump to a specific time. The DVD menu overlay is always set to 4:3 even when in 16:9. Work around is to select 4:3 while at the menu by pressing the Image button.

Viewing photos is slow and you have very little control.

I don't know about MP3s, I've yet to use the box for this purpose.

Currently, I don't own a HD TV (I bought my 42" plasma just before the HD revolution), so I'm not to fussed about viewing 1080p MKV files, but I did buy the player with the hope that this would be something I could do in the future. After numerous fruitless requests for a Firmware update, it looks like viewing HD MKV files on the 200i will always be a pain, so I may start looking for an alternative box. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
SwampFoetus

SwampFoetus,
Buy at your own risk. I used mine for about 9months. Not great but acceptable. Last week, its HDMI port died and I tried everything to revive it, nothing works. Tried to email Tomacro, no reply, in both Chinese and English. No reply. I think the company is gone, expect no more.

Perry

I'm bummed. The new 300 model looked like what I wanted.....

http://www.meritline.com/1080p-mkv-m2ts-ts-hdd-media-player-smp8635.html

All I am telling you is, buy it at your own risk. Don't expect any support, returns or anything. Also, Meritline is not a very trusting merchant from my previous experience either.

Perry

I've bought dvd media from meritline in the past with no issues. Too bad about this player, looks really nice.......I'm hoping I can get the cash for a Markus-800.....

BTW, I totally gave up on the lim and put in my order for PCH. It is supposed to be shipped on the 22nd of Sept. So, what do I do with Lim? Hmmm... I do have some doors... Haha...

Perry

BTW, I totally gave up on the lim and put in my order for PCH. It is supposed to be shipped on the 22nd of Sept. So, what do I do with Lim? Hmmm... I do have some doors... Haha...

Perry
Good choice... I have two PCH's and they work pretty well. Watching last weeks UFC right now on one...

Where is a good forum to ask about PCH functionalities? e.g. playlist possible?

Perry

Where is a good forum to ask about PCH functionalities? e.g. playlist possible?

Perry
The official PCH forum - http://www.networkedmediatank.com/

It's very active. :)

Anybody tried the firmware from kingzer?

Anybody tried the firmware from kingzer?

Well, can you give us a link for this firmware ? :)

OK I found :
http://www.kingzer.com/download_1.asp?id=19

But I'm suspicious

Well, can you give us a link for this firmware ? :)

OK I found :
http://www.kingzer.com/download_1.asp?id=19

But I'm suspicious

Anyone tried this?

K

I'm not at home, but I opened all.bin. I found "Version: Release1.60-071219".

Hey, whats the good word!

Who are Kingzer and what is their link with Tomacro? Why do they have limHD200i/210i firmware on their site?

Another question; does anyone know how you would go about writing your own firmware? I'm a coder with twenty years C/C++ experience, so I'd love to have a crack at it.

8623, no mmu, so not really a platform with much future. But easy to dev in, a bit like the 8-bit days. You will need to get mrua for 8623, it is "around" if you google hard enough. Then you get the arm kernel, with patches, and build a toolchain. The rest is up to you. You probably could not sell it, but the rest is no problem.

I'm playing around with 8634, which has an MMU and is a little bit more current. MIPS instead, but mips assembler always was nicer.

I checked the Tomacro website this morning and noticed that new limHD360 model is available and a limHD310 firmware was released on 03/09/08. So they're still working on stuff.

I've created a new forum topic on Tomacro's site for the limHD200i/210i (entitled Bug List in the limHD200i/210i section, sorry I'm not allowed to insert URLs yet) to try and help our case for a new firmware. It's a bug list of stuff we'd like fixed. I thought that if we told Tomacro what's actually wrong, maybe they will fix it.

Thanks,
SwampFoetus

P.S. Has anyone had the patience to sit and read the banner at the top of the Tomacro web pages? My personal favourite is;

"Could not get a more proper one, Can keep the original."

FYI, I just want to report back about PCH that I purchased. As far as the quality, I don't notice much difference. PCH seems to take a little longer to boot, but, otherwise preform very well. All my files that previously play in Lim plays well in PCH plus more. I am able to do a playlist for video or audio or combination. Remote is better designed, although some say it has its problems. The only regret I have is I bought the 100 unit not the 110. 100 does not have USB to PC connection! You transfer files via SMB or NFS... Very slow initially and not very reliable. I followed HiJack's suggestions (Method 2), and the cache flush function did not work for me. I ended up wasting much of my time. I finally gave up and use the ExtHDD to PCH via USB. All in all, I would give it a 90%. I now need to get used to its interface.

Thanks,
Perry

You want to run llink!

Also, USB to PC (slave) is only with HDD in ntfs mode, which means you can't run the apps, so you don't actually want to use that anyway.

You want to run llink!

I second that motion... :)

So... is anyone interested in creating a open source equivilant for the limhd200/210?

I'd love to get stuck into writing an open source firmware, but I just don't know where to start.

I'm a C/C++ programmer, with loads of experience writing windows and unix applications, but just don't know where to start for a custom firmware.

The old tomacro? Uh, start with ancient linux kernel, without MMU, ARM assembler. Once it boots userland, it is fairly straight forward, except again no MMU, so no fork, just vfork and exec.

TO do any video you need to use Sigma API, which I know little about, but you can find illegal versions of it which a bit of searching. That is all propriety, but works not unlike SDL.

To be honest, the old tomacro h/w is too old to bother. The 8634 platform is much more fun and would be worth doing, with almost all the same hurdles.

Perhaps http://www.uclinux.org/ will do any help?

Or at least, witch has sold (selling?) the most? maybe worth a try anyways?


thanks lundman, you've given us a great base to start from, feel free to contact me or anyone else interested.

hello do anyone know how to add subs to mkv. files? is it even possible?

Bump

Bump

Even though Tomacro are dead* this thread lives on to haunt them.

I wish that piece of Tomacro junk in my living room would hurry up and die so I can get on and buy something worthwhile instead.

* dead - OK so they may not have officially stopped trading and their website is still there, but they've managed to piss off everyone who ever bought a product from them, every retailer who ever carried their products and they don't even bother to respond to their own support forum. That's dead enough for me.

If you have movie named aaa.mkv and you put a file named aaa.srt in the same directory you have working subtitles (choose func also and change the background of subtitles to something dark in order to make them more visible).
Since most of the mkv files have embedded subtitles all you need to do is extract them to a separate srt file with the same name as the movie and place them in the same directory as the movie file (limd will pick up the subtitles automatically when the movie starts and you can use the subtitle button on the remote too).
In order to export the subtitles to an srt file i use dsrt315 VERY succesfully:
http://dsrt.boom.ru/down-eng.htm

Use the correct reformat action to correct overlapping times and too long of a subtitle that needs to wrap.

Also the peeps that need to downmix dts to 2 channels on limd , take a look at this link for a tool to make your dts mkv contain an ac3 stream so you can play it through the analog outputs of your player:

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showthread.php?tid=6703

Fecn and fellow victims,
I share the same complaints as many of you and I really don't know if Tomacro still is alive? But, their tech support is non-existence. Well, that left me asking for your help... before I wasted more time playing with the LimHD 200i. I am curious if it support FTP for file transfer instead of using USB? Any idea?

Sinerely,
Perry

You know what, I found my own answer, in fact, I asked this question before here, so long ago... bump! Of course, NO FTP (per russel). Thanks anyway.

Perry

If you use the firmware I modified it has FTP on there.

lundman, I tried to search for the thread you are referring to and come across this "lim-firmware-utils.tgz 2007/11/10" file in the wiki. Is this the one you are referring to? Also, I am very green in ftp stuff. So, if I use a ftp program such as FileZilla, what IP should I use? How about User Name and Password?

Sincerely,
Perry

This was a while ago so I don't remember, but I think I called my firmware "plus" versions. You use the IP of the lim to connect to it. But you need to remount it read/write (which I added SITE commands to do in FTP), or change it to ext2, which I also added support for.

Easiest way to reset the limHD200i (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QqmGbmk7t0) + relieve some steam :)

:) I'm amazed you restrained yourself this long.

Hammer too small! Explosives preferred!
(No, it's not that I hate it, but if you are going to do it, do it BIG)

Ok, I have given away my Tomacro, it was taking up too much storage space. So I can definitely no longer help with firmwares, not that there is going to be any :)

'fan' said hello too, but has not worked for Tomacro for many months.

It was fun people, but on to other things :)