New Dune Prime streamer and blu-ray player from HDi - Page 4

Grrr... so want one of these...

oferlaor or anyone else, I have recently seen the popcorn hour A100 at my friends place and really though of buying the A-110, but I was also looking for something that can play a BR disc. If I am not mistaken the Dune can play BR disc along with BR rips right?
Does it also have the same functionality as the Popcorn hour?

Hello and welcome, nice to have you here

I'm about to order a Dune BD Prime but have a couple of questions if you don't mind.

1) Is the remote the same for both Dune BD Prime & HD Center? There are no coloured buttons on the BD Prime like shown on the HD Center remote.

2) Do any of the units have a fan?

3) I will only be using ethernet for my content. Will I benefit from the GbE option in real life?

4) If I am only using ethernet for my content apart from the build quality and good looks (and maybe remote?) is there any benefit going for the more expensive HD Center?

5) Can I play dvds/blu-ray movies from folders (1:1 rip by AnyDVD HD) with full menu support?

6) Do the units autoswitch between 23.976/25/29.97Hz and 480/576/720/1080 i/p based on content?

Thanks!

Couldn't tell you for sure, but it works with NMT silver remote too, which can be annoying if you have both devices.


I only use ethernet, 100MB. You will not directly benefit from GbE, and may even have issues if you try to enable jumbo-frames (but probably wont). There is nothing wrong with GbE, if you want to keep your network pure.


Tricky one to answer. I wanted HDD so I could store my apps, telentd etc etc like I do on NMT. But it turns out these devices have/expect a permanently attached 2GB flash memory, for BD data etc. So I just use that storage. HDD for me is not needed.


Yes! Very nice feature this one.


No, not yet. It is being discussed. But I am not paying attention to that since I would not use said feature.

Thanks lundman,

before you replied I was reading another of your posts where you mentioned that hdi devs post on the mpcclub forum. I headed over there and found answers to all by questions. It is strange that this forum is so quiet compared to mpcclub.

Reading through the different posts the hdi devs are VERY actively participating with users I have never seen this level of commitment before This point alone would make me buy their product blindly.

Unfortunately reading I also found about a limitation of this device which matters to me most. The sigma chip used is the old slow one smp8634, instead of the new smp8644 which is ps3 speed like. I only have experience with ps3 and my htpc which load blu-rays in a matter of seconds. My htpc is faster than ps3. On mpcclub users are seeing load times of 45s, 1m or 2m all consequences of the sigma chip, nothing to do with hdi. I have witnessed slow speeds like these on 2 "top of the range" pioneer blu-ray players ($$$$) at the dealer. At first I thought these were broken During the agonizing seconds I was thinking my htpc would smoke this (speedwise only - video/sound on htpc is very poor compared to proper player).

I'm sure hdi will eventually release a player with the new chip. Having witnessed their level of support I will buy one even before the first reviews come out as long as it still has the build quality and looks of the Center, having carefully examined the high resolution Prime pictures I'd rather pay the difference.

You wont find a single player using smp8644 for a while yet, and essentially you will always be waiting for the next one. Having said that, I liked that HDi got around the appalling PATA controller in smp8634 by using USB->SATA instead, which is why my own speed tests I could read at 117MB/s of the HDD (Not cached).

Not entirely sure what you mean by load time? boot time, start to play a video, or setting up a BD disk to play?

boot time: strangely long on HDi and having checked what they do they can speed this up quite easily (hell, the kernel tests all ciphers before booting!). But compared to NMT, you don't boot very often. (More stable).

play video: much faster than NMT. They don't mess around as much and it starts to play after 2s delay or so.

bd disk: seem on par with most commercial BD players (not really the h/w's fault) but rather the loading of java, bd+ checks and running bdj. At least the BD+ code is in C on this player so it isn't too bad. This is all entirely run on the MIPS 200mhz chip, not the sigma chip.

trust me I'll buy the first smp8644 I can get my hands on that plays blu-ray from folders, I hope this will be hdi as I like them even if I haven't owned any of their products. How can you get 117MB/s on a usb2 controller (480/8=60MB/s theoretical)? I'm not saying you can't I'm interested in the theory.

By load time I meant player off, you approach player with blu-ray movie. Load time starts from when you press the power button and ends when the movie starts playing (logos/warnings/trailers whatever comes first). My htpc always sleeps (everything off except volatge to memory) and takes under 5s to wake up (including hdmi handshake) and I can load the movie in probably another 5-10s depending on movie. I'll time it and let you know. I don't use discs only folders much quicker.

I would boot everytime. I am a power/noise freak, when a device is not in use it must be off. ps3 has decent start speed so I hope the hdi will too.

2s delay for the video is perfectly fine no problems.

I know the hdi is easily on par with commercial BD players. It is that commercial players are not in par with ps3 or htpc. If you have owned a ps3 you would notice the difference. It is the quickest standalone out there by far even if it was the first.

Fair enough. It be at least a year before you can readily buy smp8644 devices, that it all. And the speed up you are talking about, has nothing to do with the smp8644 chip anyway.

Dune in standby come on in 1s. Which is what you can do from remote. If you want it off, you need to use the switch on the Unit, but who would do that (apart from you obviously). So in that sense it is fast enough as it is.

They really could make it faster, I think 10s boot is feasible, but I'd rather have them add more useful features that I consider essential. One of the biggest missing features in ALL smp players is you can not play music, and stay in the GUI. (and queue more music). Tsk.

Disk speed I measured with:

(more like 80MB although its playing at the moment, not idle like before. Guess thats me using B for bits and b for bytes, we really need to stop using one of them, pick one..)

When are these going to be "officially" available in the U.S.? Looks like only 1 place is selling them (in stock). Not exactly what I would describe as price advantaged for the consumer. Is it really that "NEW"?

Has anybody measured the singal from the HDi Dune player?

How about lineraty when calibrating? (does the x,y,Y stays linear when calibrating the colors with a colorimeter and software) I have seen players that are not linear in terms of color lightness, and CMY x,y coordinates, in 75%-100% stim.

Hopefully someone can comment on this!

Was wondering if any of these player have a gui interface with movie cover thumbnails? Similiar to Windows Media Center.

MyMovies is working on a HDi solution so that their database will show up on the Prime and HD Center. I saw a mention of it on their forum.

Yeah, its working, "MyMovies", that is.

Lundman do you know if playing Blu Ray ISO's are supported today?

Cheers,

Requis

I have tested bluray folders and actual legal disks, not ISO. But I can if you want, I think I have an ISO around somewhere

-rw-rw-rw- 1 owner group 4693032960 Apr 13 14:38 grp-highlander-bd5.iso

Plays without issues. Didn't seem to have a BD menu, but it sure launched the BDplayer and started playing.

Is it safe to assume that the picture quality is identical to a BD player from Pioneer, etc, when no scaling is taking place?
I would love to output 1080p/24 for BD discs and 576i/50Hz for SD discs, straight into my Lumagen. If that is the case, I will order one right away!

Does one need the optional 2GB flash drive in order to do that?

Looks like the Dune Base is coming soon. No BD-ROM but the middle slot holds a hard drive (SATA). A lot cheaper too.

http://www.hantzundpartner.com/hdi/dune_base_e.html

The 2GB flash is to store the BD+ data. So if you are to watch legal BD disks you'd want it. It plugs into the USB at the back, so it is hardly a big deal. I use the 2 USBs at the front for my USB things.

The Base has no BD-ROM, so it will not have BD license. But it should play pre-ripped disks/folders/isos.

mkvplayers had dune "on stock" last I checked, whatever that means.

hi lundman. appreciate your work. is it possible to implement a workaround for blu-ray disk backup to external hdd or nas (similar to ps3 sak)? maybe with telnet?

Bluray backup0, use AnyDVD HD. You can probably use libbluray or "debugger" mentioned on some forum I came across. As for using Dune's own player to do a backup, I'm not sure, it just isn't designed to do that. Especially the BD+ disks.

i didn't mean decrypting with dune, i mean something like this: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/out.iso and then mount/decrypt on pc. with ps3 and swiss army knife this was possible.

On surface, yes, you could do that, or even NFS exporting the BDrom. However, with BD+, it does do a whole lot of checks and tricks. But in general, AnyDVD will do the right thing. probably

Ok. I thought so.
I am an ex-owner of pch a100, wdtv, a110 (clone version), hdx1000... I was playing with egreat's 31a, 31b, looking forward to 34a... but now i have a dune bd prime.
With NMT's it was pretty simple to run telnet. But with Dune... Seems like only lundman-the-greatest know how to do it.
Can we wait for telnet.dsf from lundman?

Has any one taken time to meassure the levels out from a HDi Dune xxxx?

I have measured a Tvix 6500 and a WD TV. With video material, these players have a uniformity in lightness (Y).

You can see this for your self by comparing results from 100% color patterns, and 75% colorpatterns.

I wonder if this is the case with the HDi players as well?

Is BD prime able to stream Netflix, Hulu, etc...??

Not yet.

What's the missing link? (Hulu/Netflix)
I'm wracking my brain over here trying to figure out which media streamer to bite on. BD prime seems pretty cool, but PCH + standalone bluray seems to still amount to just a little more function for less $$$. Plus... what's the deal with having 4 different options??? I can live w/out eSata, but why make 100 or 1000 ethernet port an option? I'd like the wireless AND the gig-e port! Why not make it gig-e across the board??? In fact.... this whole process is making me a little whiny, quite frankly....(sorry)

wifi is just for those people who thinks wifi will work.
1gige is for those who already have gige network, and want to transfer with a little more speed. Streaming makes no difference if its 100/1000.
I believe no PCH does hulu/netflix yet. They are US only subscriptions, and of no interest to the manufactors so far.
Just my opinion, I am not connected to HDi/Syabas.