Santa brought me a Q10 Pro.
I was looking for a media player that does H.265. My good old WDTV served me well for many years, but it's a dead media player for too many years and I was looking for something competent to replace it. All my media is on a couple of Synology units. I have no plans to add a HDD on this unit.
Few days later I can share my experience.
Unpack the box, plug the cables, including the ethernet cable.
First boot fast, latest available version, with Android 7, a large number of settings, not easy to understand what everything does, but this forum is just amazing to find references and understand what it means.
Kodi - first run allowed me to add several network samba shares, all password protected, indexed all my RIPs properly. WOW! Why everybody says it doesn't work with password protected shares? Wait, they are right! After a reboot everything went dark. No problem, let's try the workaround with Media Center shortcuts. Hmmm, weird! mounting it with adb it doesn't work. It says share is read only! WTF! Tried all "sec=" options in mount, tried to put one of my Synology to speak SMB1. No luck. Strange, I have to troubles mounting the same share R/W from my Ubuntu. Maybe something is broken in the way it's implemented over Android 7. It would be nice to integrate everything in Kodi, but I can live without it. I'll stick to Media Center. I can get back to this problem after an upgrade, or 2
Media Center - works well. Strange menu for downloading subtitles, barely readable. Strange decision not to load external subtitles by default. It works well when subtitle is embedded. I can't seem to find any option to delete a movie directly from Media Center. It was a useful feature in WDTV. But not the end of the world. It's more important image quality is stunning, sound is good and it starts playing a movie instantly. Ah, and it remembers where I left, another important aspect.
Netflix looks really well even if it's not HD! Surprisingly well! I used to use it from my Bluray player but quality was never decent consequently I rarely use it. But that changed, on Q10Pro image quality is simply good! I had to check how much bandwidth it consumes to make sure is not HD! Sometimes when I start an episode quality looks bad, the same way it is on Bluray, but only for a couple of seconds. Big plus! Application crashes nearly everytime I exit of, but that's not a big deal; at least it doesn't crash why playing
I'm happy it plays Bluray ISO! I didn't spend hours riping my disks only to have a backup.
Ah, and what's the problem with airmouse that trigger the appearance of black android bar on the bottom of the screen? I have no clue why sometimes the black bar appears. It doesn't appear with normal remote...it is so odd!
Overall impression: I'm happy! Excellent image quality, excellent sound, fast, friendly user interface.
Some things can be done better, I'm particularly sad Kodi doesn't deliver in a friendly manner. And the fact Kodi has a small problem developing for Android is not promising. They may or may not ever make it considerably better anytime soon.
It will be nice to have a smaller model, without space for a HDD. But at least the unit has a nice look.
Topic: 3 days later with a Q10 Pro (Read 3802 times)
