I bought one because the brochure was glossy and it has words like "ogg" and
reviews like "works great".
its the only dvd player profile, dvd and network media player. so meh.
i would say that its very 'mother and father' compatible, being very
robust, quick booting and having a nice easy interface.
It reboots itself during the poweron phase, has a tanty when playing off of
a SMB share, has a REAL tanty when playing off of a USB disk, randomly turns
on subtitles when watching DVDs, loses audio channels when playing DVDs, has
a terrible interface for browsing for music or video.
make sure you update the firmware. i dont have any problems with smb or
dvd.
Their "bug reporting" service is a web forum which inevitably gets drowned
with the noise that so often accompanies a web forum: vague speculation,
no factual information, "works for me"s, and threads that go off on tangents
and never solve the original poster's problem. There is no other way to
communicate with the developers for a support issue.
yes bug reporting is quite terrible. but bugs do tend to get squashed.
The menu is really polished though!
It runs embedded Linux on a StrongARM, but I suspect all the decoding is
done in hardware on an MPEG decoder and one of those FPGA dudes programmed
to do the OGG decoding. The upshot is that the firmware upgrades can only
improve the interface, but not the codec support, I think. (Which I find
remarkable that given my laptop has workable USB and SMB client support, and
it too runs Linux, why does the Z500 have problems?)
it does use mpeg decoding chips, the cpu is not at all fast enough to
decode video. infact the cpu is barely fast enough to run the interface.
codec support is limited, but the actual media wrapping isnt. ie mkv
is on the way! as the video and audio streams are separated elsewhere.
i have also found that some codecs work better than others (ie, avis
wont fast forward, mpegs will)
The source is available on their website once you join their club (i.e.
punch in your serial number) and I have been meaning to have a tinker inside
it, but sorely lacking spare time ;-)
Any recommendations for alternatives?
Build your own PVR from mythtv, it might end up being a little more
expensive but you get all the features you want and you know how to fix it.
i personally found that mythtv didnt do what i wanted (ie brain dead
easy smb browsing) and also i couldn't put together a machine
as cheaply. once again the z500 is dvd player profile, with no hard
disk making it quite robust against hard rebooting.
pros
small profile
no hard disk
easy interface
cheap
linux
excellent hardware decoders (did i mention how awesome the video quality
is?)
hdmi, svideo, composite and component video out, scart?
optical digital audio out, (coax? digital out), stereo out, multi
channel out?
(some features im not to sure on, i dont look at the back much)
cons
still buggy
not completely upgradeable
Dean
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
