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REPASSAC – 27 minutes ago »
ariharry – 1 hour ago »
REPASSAC – 9 hours ago »
ariharry – 3 days ago »
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Humax have an excellent opportunity to push this capability, as combining a media player into a PVR is a fantastic capability to have, and is unique relative to sky plus others.
The HDR-1000S is a DLNA client rather than a full media player.
Yes, the HDR is a client served by a DLNA server, though DLNA much like other protocols is simply a transfer vehicle for the content.
The HDR does the hard job of demultiplexing the audio and video streams followed by decode (e.g. the bulk of what most media players do). It also appears to support many popular container formats and codecs, so all that’s needed is some sort of control over the display output (video post processing, e.g. scaling).
As for new codec support, the HDR supports all the key codecs (h.264, vc1, etc). New codecs like h.265 shall require new hardware, which is the case for most media players in the market today.
If you read the spec for a DLNA server – it should do the job of transcoding unless it knows the client can support it. A client is only required to support MPEG-2 but it can support a lot more
Fair enough. I have limited experience with DLNA server/client requirements (it’s never made it onto product requirements for SOC’s I’ve worked on),, though my point stands that with a bit more effort on Humax’s side, the media playback capability could match that of lower/mid end media players.
I've found a way to do this using a free tool called MPEG Streamclip (Mac, Windows).
Essentially you can open a file, then choose File -> Export to MPEG-4 which pops up the dialog box shown below.
You then do some basic maths to work out what borders need to be added at the top and bottom. For example, a file size of 640 x 272 is not 16:9. So we multiply the width by the ratio of 9/16 – i.e. 640 x (9 / 16) = 360. We then find the difference between this ideal height and the actual height – i.e. 360 – 272 = 88. We then split this between top and bottom – 88 / 2 = 44.
So we set the "crop" values for the top and bottom to be -44 (using a negative number as we are expanding rather than cropping), and click on the Make MP4 button.
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I’ve just bought one of these darned things today, and I now seriously regret it. Just goes to show, never believe the glowing reviews. This product is a pile of pants. Within the first 5 minutes use I found these flaws….. 1) Not able to switch language track in a movie on USB or over DNLA 2) Audio output is Stereo only over HDMI!!!!! No Dolby!!! 3) All movies display as “stretched”, everyone in my movies is long and thin (incorrect Aspect ratio). 4) every time the box is rebooted Subtitles come on!!! This is driving me nuts. I’m taking it straight back to the store. I wish I’d never bothered. Before anyone comments about using SPDIF, my Sony surround system prioritises to the HDMI sound where it is present. Since there is no way to disable this on either the box or my surround I am stuffed. My particular Sony amp does offer limited remapping of the Analog audio channels, but not to the SPDIF. This product is not an improvement on early Humax boxes. DON’T BUY!
Did a quick test with the update (1.00.37).
It appears that the media player does detect some aspect ratios correctly, whilst it misses others, but if I get time I’ll analyze the content to see what it can’t handle.
So well done to Humax for listening, but some more work is needed to get us closer to that ‘converged’ device that some of us want in our living rooms (and entire home, if you have an RF TV link system)..
It appears that the media player does detect some aspect ratios correctly, whilst it misses others
I agree with that, it plays some correctly. But a quick test showed that it still plays most of my movies incorrectly.
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