- Media Player Guide
In the simplest of terms, a Media Player is a device for playing digital media files on a TV or Hi-Fi.
We are surrounded by digital media. Whether in the form of digital camera video or photos, digitally stored music, or digital video movies and TV shows. The problem is that as the quantity of digital media has grown explosively, the methods used to enjoy it have stood still.
Many people nowadays have a large screen High Definition TV. It is usually located in a room specifically designed for sitting and enjoying media. A comfy sofa, table for snacks, heating turned up to high, assigned resting place for the cat. Perfect! However, very few people actually use this space for enjoying the new digital media.
Instead, most watch digital video or photos on a tiny laptop, tablet, computer, or even mobile phone(!) screen. If a TV is used it will be connected by precarious cabling arrangements to a laptop or PC, requiring repeated plugging and unplugging as well as a high degree of technical knowledge in getting everything working (and keeping it working!). Music is enjoyed either through shelves full of CDs, or by the fiddly compromise of a portable Media Player docking system.
This is not the way is has to be! The solution is straightforward and inexpensive.
A Media Player provides one central hub for the enjoyment of all digital media. You can use it to watch any video file, any piece of music, or to view all your photos. All this in a simple to use, energy efficient, and compact box. Connect the Media Player up to both your TV and your Hi-Fi and you have an instant and convenient way to enjoy your music collection in the best possible quality.
The really great thing is that Media Players are now incredibly inexpensive.
What files will a Media Player play?
Media Players are designed to play as close to everything as possible. 1080p, 720p, AVI, MKV, RMVB, TS, MOV, M2TS, MPEG 1/2/4, ASF, DivX, ISO, MP4,MP3, AAC, WAV, MPA, OGG, TrueHD, DTS, DTS-HD MA.. The list of formats is near endless. The point of a Media Player is to play everything easily through one simple box.
It doesn't matter whether the files are from a camcorder, a digital camera, backups of VHS tapes, your DVD collection ripped to MKV, DivX video downloaded from the internet, H.264 video downloaded from the internet, your music collection ripped to MP3, your music collection ripped to MP3, or any other of countless sources, a Media Player is designed to play it.
How will I store and access this digital media?
Media Players can be roughly divided into three types, non-networked, networked, and internet on-demand.
Non-networked players use either an internal hard drive or storage attached to the Media Player such as an attached USB hard drive, attached USB pen drive, SD Card, or an eSATA hard drive. You load the storage with your digital media files from a computer, or simply remove an SD card from a camera and insert it in the player.
Networked players have the option of local storage but can also access a local network or the internet. This allows the player to access digital media stored on a home PC, or a dedicated storage device (NAS).
Some networked players are also internet connected. The degree to which this is an advantage varies massively between players depending on the content the player is able to access. Content varies from internet radio through to paid video-on-demand services such as Netflix. Examples of this type of player are BoxeeBox, AppleTV, and GoogleTV.
As of 2011 we are starting to see Android based media players. These are usually ARM based and run Google's Android 2.2. Because the chip and operating system is not specifically built for playing media these players have poorer media file format support and worse playback performance than a player using a dedicated media chipset. What they do have however is a full web browser with Flash 10.1 and the ability to download Android apps. This browser may allow access to services like iPlayer.
| futeko Internet On-DemandWe expect to stock Android based Media Players at some point in the future but are waiting to see what exact kind of media playback performance these devices have before making a commitment. |
| Simplicity | Unlike a PC or laptop, a Media Player simply plugs into your TV and works. No complex setup. |
| Power | Modern Media Players are better at video decoding than even the fastest PCs. |
| Portability | Thousands of hours of HD video can be stored on a device smaller than an old VHS cassette. |
| Energy Efficiency | Energy consumption is tiny compared to running a PC. |
| Native format support | You can play virtually any file without transcoding (as you often have to with PS3 / Xbox). |
| Streamline your home | No more messing about hooking up the laptop to the TV or running an intrusive cable around the house. |
| Price | All this power and functionality can be had for considerably less than £100! |
Media Players use a single chipset (a single CPU / processor) for almost all of their functions. This method allows the players to be compact and relatively cheap. This single 'System on a Chip' (often abbreviated to SoC) is responsible for the video decoding (format support and performance), audio decoding (format support and performance), and networking capabilities.
There are two companies that dominate the market for HD Media Player chipsets, 'Sigma Designs' and 'Realtek'. A detailed summary and timeline of chipset developments can be found on our other site, iboum.com - see here. To summarise the situation, there has been continual rapid development in Media Player chipsets over recent years leading to them now offering near complete native file format support. Media Players are designed to play everything! This is a key difference between Media Players and the streaming support offered by some TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players, or games consoles.
Because of the SoC design, the firmware and user interface for players with the same chipset is often very similar or near identical. Certainly with Realtek chipsets, Media Players based on the same chipset will usually use the same underlying code (SDK - Software Development Kit) from Realtek and therefore have the same basic features and interface. This is one big reason why we can import players from Asia that operate in exactly the same way as players from Western brands.
So the chipset is the same giving the same format support and performance, whilst the underlying firmware is also the same giving a very similar interface and functions.
It is true that some Western brands go to some length to modify the look of the firmware and add some features to improve it, but most stick very close to the original. Realtek (for instance) release fairly regular updates to their SDK so making local improvements is often not worth it as the next Realtek SDK renders them obsolete. A classic example is the effort Xtreamer went to in releasing SDK2 firmwares with a jukebox only for Realtek SDK4 to come along soon after with 'perhaps better' versions of these features made available to all players.
In recent times this rule has been blurred slightly as some brands have managed to port Realtek SDK4 back to older Realtek chipsets but some haven't. So it boils down to the willingness / ability of manufacturers to keep pace with SDK updates.
The situation for Sigma players is a bit different, with no default Sigma interface in the SDK, only an underlying ability to decode media files. This lack of an interface has made it more time consuming to write firmware for Sigma players and is the main reason why the number of Realtek players is far higher than that for Sigma, and Sigma players are more expensive. But the basic rule that players with the same chipset will have the same format support and performance still stands.
Other chipsets have attempted to break the duopoly. Amlogic have produced a number of decent chipsets with their own SDK, and the Boxchip F10 managed to push 1080p video decoding to a lower price than ever before by modifying a chip first used for tablet computing. In recent months the behemoth Intel have started pushing their CE4100 range of SoCs. These are more powerful as general CPUs but are only appearing in very expensive players and are perhaps someway behind in video decoding terms.
2011 will see new chipsets launched from all the main players. Check out the iboum site for more ramblings about Media Player chipsets!
For more information we recommend our other site, iboum.com. It is an index of every HD Media Player ever launched and contains articles on various issues/questions related to Media Players. Examples are Media Player Chipsets, and HD Audio.
