Micca EP950! - Page 4

Just took a look at the product page and nowhere on the page does it even mention 3D at all. I'm quite amazed at that really. I know this must support 3D sbs,o/u, ISO right? But how can there be no mention anywhere in the manual or webpage of it's 3D capability?

Anyways maybe Jack could answer some of my questions above when he sees them.

I'm having all kinds of problems with this unit now that I added a HD to it. I was able to successfully copy files over usb to it, but copying files via samba usually ends up in me having to reformat the drive or else it won't recognize it anymore. I've been using a WD 640gb caviar blue that I have sitting around. Going to try a seagate 2TB LP drive to see if its a power issue or something else, but I don't like how this is looking.

I've only copied files either directly to the drive or USB, so I can't speak about samba.

However, I was having the infamous and dreaded "scan and fix" problem with ntfs, so I reformatted the drive to ext3. If you aren't using ext3 already, it may be worth trying.

eagle_2,

Hey, the squished 16:9 DVD menus are present in the EP600 & EP950 too. Along with every realtek-based player I've used since '09, back to the 1055 and everything in-between then and now and since.

My guess is that DVD menu support is some sort of compiled module in the realtek SDK, and the hardware vendors either use it or don't - or have to write their own from scratch. As far as I know, none have written their own - although I welcome any corrections.

After three years, I don't hold out much hope for it ever being fixed. Surprisingly, it doesn't bother many people. It requires a bit of an Adrian Monk-ness to get all worked up about standard definition squished DVD menus. Personally, I find it jarring and off-putting - but that's just me.

I'm reasonably sure that the offending DVD files can be re-authored to work around the problem, perhaps with the side effect of screwing up 4:3 compatibility. I plan to give a try some day if I get to that point on my to-do list.

So, you'll have to go Sigma to get unsquished 16:9 DVD menus. But Sigma is not without annoyances, but Dune seems to keep many of them under control. Maybe the "pop" thing too? I don't know who else does great firmware with Sigma nowadays.

I saw the review you posted on Amazon, in which you mentioned that the EP600 you received was scratched. This is actually a common inquiry we receive that has a rather benign underlying cause: the front of the player has a clear plastic film that protects the glossy front of the player during the manufacturing process. This film is not removed and is left up to the buyer to remove after purchase. This film often shows scratches on it and most buyers do not realize that this film is there. This is because about 70% of the players returned to us have this film completely intact, with some containing the return reason of "item is scratched/damaged".

In the future, we will be removing this clear film at the factory.

As for the EP950 you received, your description seem to indicate a product that was previously purchased and then returned to Amazon.


Amazon only does this for inventory sold directly by them. The only time that third party inventory like ours are transferred to their warehouse deals team is if it was damaged by Amazon in their warehouse.

Again, these are not excuses - we feel that customers deserve an explanation when something like this happens.

The manual is not up to our usual standards, which we are in the process of rectifying. The player supports side by side, top and bottom, and frame packed 3D formats.


That is correct, it will treat the entire folder the same way as a BD ISO.


I am not sure about this as I have not heard any indications either way. I will have send a request for this to be tested, unless someone else has already tried it.


Yes to all of the above.


Yes, we release new firmware every 3-4 months for in-production players.

Not my review. I didn't post any reviews on Amazon for any of your products. I wouldn't post a review without the company's response first, which is why I posted here.


Jack, while I'm sure that some customers don't know about the film, I am not one of them. I've been purchasing consumer electronics for 30 years and packaged electronics from The Far East for at least 20 years; so, I know how cheap crap from China is wrapped up. My Toshiba Thrive tablet had enough clear plastic film on it to wallpaper my bathroom, and I had it all off within 5 minutes after opening the package.


That is a good policy to have. But, I'm kinda sorry I brought it up. I should have just been happy with the exchange and left it at that. But, anyway, thanks.

My EP-950 ordered via Amazon finally came in today and so far all features work great except Upnp. If you select Upnp menu item in file manager the box reboots. Network is working using NFS and windows shares. Upnp (WMP and Asset) are active. The box has Firmware: 1.0.2.6
Any idea what can course this or do I need to return the box?

Thanks

Are you using windows? Just curious cause I wouldn't think ext3 partitions would mount correctly when you plug it in via usb.

It seems that i corrected most of the issues I was having. I think the culprit is the safe powerdown option in the system setup menu. Apparently it's default is off. I turned it on and now it actually waits to unmount and power down the drive. Manual says this should be set to on anyhow. Not sure why it defaults to off. I also disabled auto drive power down and swapped to a seagate LP drive. I couldn't find any specs on max drive power for the EP950, so I figured get the lost power drive I could find to hopefully improve reliability.

I'll put it through it's paces some more this week see if anything else falls out, but it is at least behaving better now with a HD.


Few unlrelated issues I noticed with this player as well.

1. Apparently it likes to not power on. It usually takes 2-3 power on remote pushes or presses of the power button on the front panel to finally get the idea that it needs to turn on. I can tell it gets the power signal as it looks to attempt to power on then go right back down. Anybody else having this problem?

2. About 30% of the time when getting into the root menu after power up the video doesn't come on. If i toggle through the video format button it comes back, but it's kind of annoying cause I have to go all the way around to get back to 1080P 60hz. Anybody else having seeing similar behavior?

I still think this thing is pretty good for $150 player, but I'm definately looking forward to more mature fw. It is a little rough around the edges.

Jack@Micca, on Amazon the EP950 product title is "Micca EP950 1080p 3D Digital Media Player with Gigabit Network, USB 3.0, and 3.5" HDD Drive Bay (Realtek 1186)." However, on your company's website the specifications state "2 x USB 2.0 Host Port." Which USB version is correct for the EP950? Thank you in advance for your time. It is great you are involved in this forum.

Jack, according to Bonapart's post above, it will not play 16:9 DVD menus correctly. Can you please pass this information on to the proper people and recommend this gets some attention? The DVD menus look terrible squashed in - very unpolished and unprofessional, and of course makes the DVD menu text hard to read, plus it looks like hell. DVD players have been playing 16:9 menus properly for ages, I'm amazed that a brand new media player in 2012 can't do it right. Can you look into this please? It's one of the things I was very disappointed about with the Iconbit.

Thanks for answering some questions. Mostly good news, if something can be done to fix the 16:9 menu problem.

I am more than impressed by the 950

Been using my PS3 for years for hi-def mkv's and having to jump through all the hoops involved.

So nice to have a simple machine that does everything the PS3 does video-wise and so much more..
No more Fat32 drives... no more muxing mkv's and losing the DTS..
and so on.....
More importently, the ability to plug a PC-Bluray drive into this is the clincher...it works perfectly !! No more tossing a player just because the optical drive burns out !
Im also running three 1.5 T hard-drives, one internal and two USB.

The only problem Ive had is it wont show subtitles on my Battlestar Galactica rips..vob/sub imbedded in the 5 gig per episode rips from my Bluray set... quite a project.

Eveything else is great and future firmwares will only make it better.....hats off to Micca !!

Just received this machine while at work. Can't wait to get back home later in the afternoon and give it a test drive. Will post results later

Just a pic showing the box...

I received my player Micca 950 yesterday from Amazon and it came with the latest firmware 1.0.2.6 pre-installed. There are some obvious bugs (power on/off, etc.) but it was amazing to watch an ISO DVD streamed across my network to my TV!

I have a few questions about this unit.

1. I have a Windows Home server on my (100% wired, gigabit router) network with all my movies neatly tucked into folders but I cannot seem to build the Micca Movie database. The "Movie, Photos, and Music" icons on the main screen are not clickable (nothing happens, greyed out?)

The Micca does not prompt me to build the database. The manual says “The Media Library Guide will automatically appear to help you to create the media library step by step if a storage device is present and the media library is empty”. Does this mean that I MUST use a local hard drive? I tried a factory reset but to no avail.

UPnP file browsing shows my server(s) and shared folders but they all show up as empty. Why is this? I can use the regular file browsing method to manually browse into my Home server folders and start a movie but only after I enter a username and password to authenticate the connection.

I also have a UPnP capable NAS that does not require authentication. I put a few movies on it and I can browse and see my movies (UPnP browsing still shows an empty folder) in file manager (no password required) but the "add this folder to the database" option is still greyed out. Any ideas?

2. Can this unit "convert" a normal 2D stream to a 3D stream? It says nothing in the manual about 3D and there are no 3D buttons whatsoever on the remote control or in the software menus.

does this have USB hub support?

What is this power on/off bug that has been mentioned a couple times? Is this something that can be fixed in a firmware or is it hardware related?

3 or 4 firmware updates a year doesn't sound like very much to be honest. The Iconbit has only been out for a few months and it already has 7 firmware updates available on their site. I would think that something like this would get more that 1 update every 3 or 4 months, especially since there are lots and lots of bugs being reported in these forums for all of these 1186 media players. To think I'd have to wait 3 or 4 months to see the next update to maybe fix a bug doesn't exactly sound promising.

Well, I got this player yesterday and I was looking forward to some 3D playing time......Not so fast

Pros
* fast navigation
* very good quallity build
* available ports
* 2D picture quality is really good
* 2D to 3D conversion (does not really add any depth, but it can do it.)
Cons
* Stock FW is buggy (once updated, the player is a lot better)
* No 3D options in settings or remote (in order for 3D to work you have to press the menu button in remote and scroll down to 3D for this to work.
* For some unknown reason my 3D blu-ray ISO backups would not play in 3D (They are store in my NAS and accessible via wired network, menus played great with picture and sound but movies played only in 2D) Overall is good but needs improvements.

The first power issue I have had are you hit the power button on the remote or front panel and it flickers on to white then back to red. This can happen anywhere from 0->5+ times until it actually decides it wants to power on. It's not really that annoying it only takes a few secs to power up. But why this was not fixed before release, I don't know. I personally work in validation for a large tech company. We would never release something that takes multiple power presses to turn on. And it's not like this could be missed in testing. It's very evident, it was the first thing i noticed when I powered it on. Thought my unit was defective or something but then read around and I wasn't alone.

Second "power issue" I have, which I'm not sure if anybody else has seen this is sometimes the video dies after the splash screen with the film real. Not sure this can be quantified as a power issue, but it only happens on boot. Pretty much the box comes on looks like it's going to goto the first menu, front lcd shows proper menu, and everything is still there, you can change the front lcd by blindly going through stuff. However the video is still down. To get it back I just go through the video modes until i get back to 1080P 60 and everything is good to go. This one is actually way more annoying then the other power one cause it takes longer to fix/work around, but I see it maybe 10-20% of the time. I think the box only powers up on first attempt maybe 5% of the time, so the first issue is way more evident.

None of the issues I have had so far are really that big of a deal. Now if this box was 2x the cost it is I would expect more polish. However at it's price point I'm not sure there is anything better.

Are there any 3D menus for sbs,o/u.eye swap etc.

No idea, I usually do this on my tv. Since I first tested the F-SBS(doesn't work) and H-SBS, I pretty much decided I prefer just keeping my rips as ISO. I could see the quality difference between H-SBS and MVC fairly easily on my 65" tv. With the isos i just click play my tv recognizes it as MVC and it goes straight to 3d. H-SBS i click play, see the double image on my tv and swap the 3d mode on my tv to SBS. So i haven't really investigated any 3d settings on the 950 itself.

In order to select 3D options, while the movie is playing, you have to press the menu button, scroll down to the 3D SBS or Top/Bottom options and press select. This will change the file to 3D. There are no swap eyes function that I have found so far.

Okay I just received this unit and I am already extremely frustrated after testing it for only a couple hours. Here are my immediate thoughts:

1) I almost immediately encountered the "power on" problem that others are mentioning. I hit the power button on the remote and the red power indicator turns white for a fraction of a second and immediately turns red again and stays off. You have to repeatedly press the power button multiple times before it decides to stay on. It happens randomly, not every time, but it happens often. This is completely unacceptable and I'm shocked that a company will box and sell a product that literally won't even turn itself on. This needs to be fixed immediately.

2) The 1186 chip seems to have a major problem with some side-by-side/over-under 3D files, namely tv captures. I tried the same group of 3D test files that I tried with the Iconbit and the results were exactly the same. If I play a 3D file and then go into the menu and select side-by-side/top-bottom from the 3D menu, it goes into 3D mode, but the video immediately plays choppy. The video stutters every second, on-the-second. It's like clockwork. Every second, the video jumps ahead a few frames, making it unwatchable. My Samsung 3D tv plays the files perfectly if I play them directly through the tv's usb input. If I set the 3D mode to off in the settings (2D) so that it is playing the file side-by-side, and then enable 3D in my tv menu instead of letting the Micca handle it, the file plays fine. So this is clearly a bug with the 3D mode enabled from the player - if I play the side-by-side file in 2D it plays smoothly, if I play it in 3D mode it stutters every second. I believe this is a flaw with the 1186 chip because the Iconbit was the same way. I'll accept that maybe there is something different with the tv captures that might not be ideal compared to a Blu-Ray rip, but my Samsung tv can play them fine, so why can't this player?

This makes it a very poor choice for 3D playback of Side-by-Side files, especially if you watch 3D captures, because while I can play it in 2D mode and let the tv switch to 3D mode via it's own menu, if I do that the on-screen menus on the Micca will be unreadable with the glasses on because the tv will be processing the 3D not the Micca, so the Micca menus will not be in 3D mode! So to watch 3D side-by-side files I need to play them in 2D then set my tv to side-by-side mode, and if I want to see the Micca menus during playback I have to remove my glasses or close one eye.

I'll also mention that most of the files that play choppy are 3D captures from 3D tv broadcasts (Sky 3D, Comcast, etc). It seems to play 3D Blu-ray side-by-side rips fine so far. But all the tv captures I have exhibit this behavior - .ts, .mkv, .avi, .mov, .wmv. All the files were played back from a USB flash drive connected directly to the Micca.

3) There is no option to swap left/right frames in the 3D menu. This option was available in the Iconbit when you played a 3D file or ISO, right in the 3D menu options. The 3D menu of this player has no option for left/right swap, and is very much needed, as some 3D files are encoded with right eye first instead of the more common left eye first. EDIT: FIXED.

4) As I feared, just like the Iconbit, DVD menus will not display correctly if the menu is 16:9. It will squish it into a 4:3 frame, making it look awful and the text quite unreadable. Obviously an issue with the 1186 chip, and this is something I find unacceptable.

5) It will not play video with a resolution higher than 1080p. Full SBS 3D files are a no-go. Why? My pc can play them just fine. Why can't it just downsize a larger file to 1080p to fit the screen like it does with photos?

6) I cannot connect directly to my Windows 7 pc via wired lan. Oddly, it will connect if I run it through my router, but then full Blu-Ray ISO playback is impossible because the video cannot stream without freezing constantly. The Iconbit also couldn't handle the Blu-Ray bitrate over lan unless directly connected to my pc - the router causes stuttering and freezing. But the Iconbit automatically detected my homegroup - the Micca will not. I select automatic under network and it tests and then says it fails. Why will this connect to my router but not directly to my pc?


If anybody can help me with issue 6 I would appreciate it. As for the first 4 issues, these need to be fixed ASAP if I am to keep this unit. Overall it seems nice - I love the build quality, and it looks beautiful. It also has some nice options that the Iconbit does not - direct playback of Blu-Ray and DVD folders are awesome, plus nice options for Bd-Lite/1.0 menus. But these are some pretty serious issues I have listed- and they need to be addressed. I have no intention of keeping this unit with these bugs if they will not be addressed in a timely manner, not in 4 months. I bought this so that I could enjoy my media now, not later this summer if a firmware happens to fix it. I'm sorry for sounding harsh but I'm so very tired of seeing products rushed to market with serious bugs because they were not tested thoroughly before release. You expect it for software nowadays, but for a $150 media player, I would expect it to be fully-functional out-of-the-box, not in a half-broken state that requires multiple firmware updates over half-a-year or longer. We in the forums are finding these issues out quite quickly - I've only had this thing for a few hours and I have run into these issues. Has nobody at Micca actually tried different 3D files for testing purposes? If they tried playing 3D files from various sources they would have likely run into the same issues I have been finding, as well as the other problems I have listed.

I want to keep this - I really do. I'd rather not return it. I want to like it. Please let me know what the plan is to address these issues. Thank you.

I assume your using an ethernet cross over cable or straight? your other player may support auto mdix.

#6 requires a crossover cable and either a dhcp server (Win7 can do this i believe) or static ips. Easiest thing is just buy a gigabit switch and connect that to your router, then connect all your devices to the gigabit switch. Routers are usually 100mbps. There are some that have gigabit built in though, i'm guessing based on your comments yours isn't.

#5 I wish it supported higher than 1080p so F-SBS worked, however your computer has a lot more memory bandwidth and processing power than the SoC inside the ep950. So expecting it to handle it just like your pc isn't a fair comparison.

A far as #6, why did the Iconbit work then? The Iconbit was connected directly to the pc via crossover cable, just like this. It automatically detected my homegroup and allowed me to browse the files in my shared folders. The Micca also has this automatic detection, but it fails. If the Iconbit automatically detected my pc through the lan cable, then this should too. It's supposed to.

The router is a Fios Actiontec router, and it messes up my speeds for some reason when I run this or the Iconbit through it. The Iconbit worked fine when I connected it directly to my pc. Blu-Ray ISOs were playing fine on the Iconbit when it was connected directly to the pc, and this was just a few days ago. I didn't need a server or gigabit switch. I just plugged the cable into my 2nd ethernet jack on my pc and the Iconbit saw my homegroup.



For #5, I can understand that.

What of the other issues?

I don't work for micca so I didn't feel obligated to comment on items I had no experience with. On the networking side, just buy a gigabit switch. Crossover direct link to a pc is kind of hokey. I mean it can be done but you might have to go in and configure extra things. Its not always just plug in play. A switch is. 5 port gigabit switch is like $20. Also it sounds like your router only has a 100mbps switch if you are having bluray streaming issues.

So far mine has played everything I've thrown at it. 3d rips look awesome and no stutter at all on my wired gigabit network running off a Synology nas. Power on problem happened the first time but hasn't since.

Just as mace777 mentioned I can't figure out how to build a Media Library off the nas. Hopefully an answer on that is forthcoming.

Over all for $150 player it's a nice value. If some of these bugs get worked out soon it could be a real winner.

So I flashed my Micca with the latest 1.0.3.5 beta Himedia firmware and all the same issues remain.

- stuttering 3D files but fine in 2D mode. All of the files that stutter in 3D mode are in either 25.000 fps or 50.000 fps according to mediainfo, except one - which was 29.970 fps.

- still having the same startup problem with having to repeatedly hit the power button to turn on. Ridiculous!

- 16:9 DVD menus display as 4:3 squished

- No swap left/right function in 3D menu options. This is very important. EDIT: FIXED.

This could be a fantastic player but there are bugs that absolutely must be addressed. And I still can't connect to my pc directly through wired lan using its auto "Wired Lan Setup>DHCP IP (AUTO)>DNS (AUTO) mode). And I temporarily disabled my firewall to make sure nothing was blocking it since it blocks it when connected to the router if I don't disable it.

You mention all play tests were done off a usb flash drive. I'm guessing you mean non-spinning type eeprom. If so, have you checked for the same sort of stuttering when playing from a usb hard drive (spinning) or sata connected hard drive?