AIOS HD MC by Pivos, any one? 1185? - Page 4

My pivos just got delivered

please post a review of picture quality!

For $89 dollars this player it just plain awesome!!!


First setup:
Hooking it up to my AVR = 1 min.
Turning it on, enabling samba shares, etc = less than 2 min.
Connecting it to my wired network and finding movies shares = less than 2 min.

It played every m2ts file I threw at it with HD sound. Picture quality just as good if not better than the A300.

It played every SD MKV file I threw at it. Picture quality just as good as DVD quality.

Cons:
It can play folder structure with multiple file formats, which is okay since I'm making all my SD folder structure into MKV main movie.

It make a crackling sound whenever you move the cursor or selection. I guess it is supposed to sound like a click, but it sounds more like an awful crackling sound to me. However, you can turn this off under set up options.

Another issue with my shares (not the players fault): I've got a bunch of folders and drives that are being shared in my PC W7. So, the player sees all of it, which makes it a little annoying to find the two drives with my movies.

However, I will fix this later by condensing the shares into two big folders / drives

Also, a lot of my movie folders have left over cover / fan art left over from the A-300 NMJ, and the AIOS displays them as folder art...its cool.

All in all, I am very happy and satisfied with the AIOS. Next thing I will be doing is to flash it with the xtreamer UI and make it look even more awersome!

If the me8eder I've order has issues, I will be returning it to buy another AIOS!

Gus Gus,

Could you also be sure and post your thoughts when you flash it with Xtremer UI?

Seems like a lot of people switch back and you also miss out on the support for the Pivos forums as they do not support 3rd party software.

Really want to hear what you think of the 3rd Party UI and not make sure you can still have DTS-MA and chapter skipping with it

Let me ask you to confirm this specifically: when playing a BD.m2ts file does it bitstream DTS-HD and DD TrueHD to your AVR?

Yes, it does!

I will do that, but like I've said before I might not have time to do this until the weekend.

and it also does it from a blu ray iso file....
If I could just get the "menu" thing figured out this thing would be awesome. But it is NOT awesome if I can only play one episode of a tv series from my blu ray iso...

Jakmal - a reviewer and analyst from Anandtech runs HQV tests... he started a thread on this forum a few months for support for it...

Here is a link with HQV test results from some media players he reviewed:

http://www.anandtech.com/print/4212

This one has a HTPC with graphics card, Realtek, and Sigma chipsets..

The AIOS:
Well as much as like the interface of both the xstreamer hacked one and the "semi" official frimware, I think these are going back. Picture quality is great but I have a bunch of iso's for tv shows that are, apparently, bd 2.0 and simply won't play on the boxes. I get a total of one episode out of each blu ray rip and there appears to be no way to get around the issue. I can live without blu ray menus per se, but I can't live with not being able to play my rips.
A shame as I really like most things on this box. If anyone has any ideas that I missed (besides redoing my rips) let me know!

I don't really see a way out of that other than a player that supports at least simple menus in some capacity. In order to view individual episodes you need a player that allows you to select a playlist. It sounds like this player is doing what many others in this price range do -- goes into the .iso file and picks the biggest .m2ts file in the STREAM folder for playback.

But that's OK with me and at this price I'm interested.
So next question -- does it do DLNA.

Don't know about dlna and won't be doing any further testing as it is useless to me without some simple form of navigation. What chaps my arse is that aaron (in the pbo and aios wiki's) specifically said that it has menu support! That is why I pulled the trigger on a pair as I like just about everything else about it especially with custom firmware...

Stupid question...but How can you tell if your Blu Ray is 1.0 or 2.0? I have one on order and dont want to hook it u p if the majority of my blu-rays are 2.0.

Is everything moving to 2.0? If so, will this player be obsoleted soon or is it something they can firmware update to handle?

I have a WDTD live plus. Does that handle 2.0 as my rips play fine on that.

Well good thing I don't do full ISO movies for either BD or SD. I only do main movie as m2ts or mkv.

I've got a couple movie shows, which I will be doing them individually as mkvs, and then try to merge them together into one big file. I'm hoping this works out

One thing I've found that doesn't work with the AISO is forced subs. I was playing Avatar, and whenever they spoke navi the subs wouldn't come up. I had to turn the force subs on. After that whenever the navi language was spoken the subs came up.

I haven't updated the FW yet. I'll be doing that tomorrow, and see if the force subs are fixed with the new FW. If not, I don't mind it that much. For $89 bucks it plays my files without any problems and I don't lose any sound

I will be trying both of the UI and see which one works best and which one my wife likes best as well. So far my wife was able to use this player without my help, which is a super duper plus!


The mede8er will be here today, but I won't be able to tested until tomorrow.

I just got off work, and I've got to go back in 6 hours .

lol ... first its aasoror not aaron
second, the player does indeed fully support BD 1.0 profile including menus.

BD 2.0 profile (java based) is not supported and wont be supported, the setup menus has an option for BR menu (on/off) and apparently this means pickup the longest track or something (which expectantly doesn't work for series).

streamerlover, the chuck BR you posted about is BD 2.0, sorry but there is no way around it.

Yes the box has a DLNA DMR function.

Yes the box has a jukebox function (on the semiofficial firmware).



The 2.8.3.2 firmware has an auto load subs option.

I am still so confused on this BD 2.0 profile issue

Does it only have to do with menu support? It has nothing to do with the Blu ray Rips being able to play or chapter skipping or ISO's (if you only rip main movie to an iso) or MKV's?

I only care about those 2 things (that the rip plays and that I can skip chapters), so I don't have to worry about 2.0 since I dont care about menu support? Please confirm

Let me put it this way. If you have blu ray iso rips that are 2.0 you won't be happy. There is NO WAY to navigate to anything on the disc. The player will pick one track and play it (presumably the longest one) and that's it. When you have blu ray iso rips that are a TV series that means you can't access anything other than the one episode that the player picks. So that means there are 5 more epsiodes on my disc I can't view. You could also NOT do chapter skips when I tried even on the one episode. It would allow me to jump by minutes but not by chapters.

aasoror,
Sorry for the misspelling! I have been a fan since I bought in on the PBO in the very very early days and have followed your postings ever since! YOu really should change up your Amazon review a bit though to add the part of blu ray menus and 2.0. (your review was what made me pull the trigger)

Thanks for letting me know. I just updated the player with the new FW but didn't check the set up options. This makes it even better. I'm very happy with this player due to mainly price and then its functions. It simple and works for my set up.

Now I'm hoping after merging several move into one file that the player will play it...I don't see why not. If it does ill be doing my few TV shows this way.

Actually I did .. if check my amazon review ..

in 11/25 it was 2.8.2.8 firmware, and that had the option for simple BD menus, for some reason in 2.8.3.2 they replaced that with "BD menus on/off" the reason might be that simple BD menus never worked to start with ? I don't know all the titles I have tried are BD 1.0 compliant so menus worked for me without a problem.



You can make a multichapter single MKV out of them, and it should work.

My bad, must have missed that part, or just ASSumed that I would still be able to play 2.0 discs just not with menus...

Wont it play the rip chapter by chapter if you disable menu support? The ISO should still have chapters for each episode I'd think but maybe I'm wrong. I know it does chapters great in my Avatar ISO, just doesn't have a menu.
MY WDTV Live wont do chapters at all in this one so I have to scroll through it by time if I want to get to some specific chapter or spot.
None of my rips have menus that work so they all must be 2.0 and I also thought that it fully supported them, BUT at least chapters and other modes work, unlike my Live, so I can live with it.
The Live didn't even support menus in DVD ISO's either till recently and this one does those great.
I think the video quality is as good or better then my Live and the navigation functions are much better too so I mainly use it now and fire up the Live for some of the extra widgets that it has in the b-rad firmwares that I'm sure this one will get most of sooner or later.

Interesting post to me for two reasons: [1] you have the AIOS [2] you also have a WD Live for comparison. The fact that it passes DTS-MA makes this $89 box very attractive to me -- I may not be able to hear the difference between DTS and DTS-MA with my audio rig, but I want it anyway.

A couple questions for you, if you don't mind.

• You say you have chapter skip with your Avatar.iso rip -- I'm assuming we are talking BluRay. Is your Avatar.iso rip a full-disk rip or just the main_title rip?
• Are you sure it's an actual chapter skip and not just a simple time-increment skip (the WD Live doesn't do chapter skip but does a 10 min skip)?
• Is it a full bitrate rip? Are you playing over network and if so are you seeing any stuttering or is it smooth playback?

I am asking all of these annoying questions because I have the WDTV Live + and the AIOS on order and can't play with my AOIS yet

Alright people,

I was able to flash my AIOS with the Xtremer UI, and it looks much better. I like it.

My set up for my movies is share via samba network, and I was unable to scrape / scan my drives with the Xtremer jukebox. I don't know why, but there isn't an option to do this. I played around with it for 30 min. trying to find out how to do it, and I was unable to do so.

However, it did display whatever art was left over by the A-300. So, what I am thinking of doing is to let my Mede8er do the scraping for it, and then I am hoping the AIOS with xtremer UI will pick up the art.

I left everything set up as a list, which is more than enough for this player since it will be set in my bedroom. Everything plays fine.

I haven't had time to test the mede8er yet. I need to finish ripping my BD movies and thereafter I'll play around with the mede8er.

It is a straight up ISO of the original single disk blue Ray I bought and yes it skips chapter by chapter. I didn't dumb anything down, just picked main movie and let it go so it's full bitrate and all that and yes it plays glass smooth as long as the network isn't bogged down. I have also played it from one of my USB external drives and same thing, chapter skip and glass smooth.
I don't think that original disk had any extras at all, just the main movie and audio tracks so I just picked whatever would also work to a 25 gig BD blank and let it go. IF you want me to try anything special to double check let me know as I can re rip it or whatever to what you want to know about.
I have noticed the Live does the 10 minute skip thing too but the Aios also does a scroll bar at the bottom that moves with a time readout so you can navigate that way too when you push the left or right keys, pretty handy and I use that feature all the time.

I never used the jukebox features of the XtrAIOS, actually its no longer a daily driver on any of my AIOS'es. That said, you might want to ask on the wiki, lots of success stories out there.


If you have a folder.jpg and a poster.jpg in your movie folder you can use the cover/poster view available on the (semi)official firmwares.

So far I've only been able to flash it with the XtrAIOS. I'm trying to finish changing my SD Movies container to MKV. After that I'm going to set up the mede8er for the living room and move the AIOS to the master bedroom.

After that I am going to finish ripping my BD movies. After that I'll try to flash the AIOS with a different UI / Jukebox.

What do you use now on your AIOS?

The three of them are running semiofficial R15, with automounting samba network shares, simple movie wall via the nfs hack and movie jukebox.

I tried the Xtraios and it was just really hard to see and all that on my Aios and I was still testing it out so I have stayed with stock and semi official for now too. I'm also running R15 but haven't tried the movie wall yet, use a couple of external hard drives, and my network shares. Might throw my other 2tb drive inside the box that is now in a external case.

I tried using the R15, but it wouldn't let me see my samba shares, which is weird because with XtrAIOS I can see them without any issues. I will try to use it again today, and see if I can figure it out.

I used mymovies to get cover art, and it worked for the XtrAIOS, and for the mede8er as well. However, I don't have any movie wall yet