detail information

Now down to the important part of the review, how did the Markus 800 cope with Full 1080p playback? We commenced by playing 1080p MKV files. The playback was smooth which surprised me, although I found the colors to be washed out and bleached. This was remedied by the setup command whilst the movie was playing and allowed me access to the usual video tweaking sections (brightness, contrast and saturation). The video was sharp and detailed and I waited and waited for the slightest lag, stutter or out of sync playback but it just didn‟t happen.

The entire movie played back flawlessly. Unable to accept the device was capable of Full 1080p playback (the pessimist in me) I searched out a higher bit rate encoded MKV. I sparked up 3/10 to Yuma, knowing that the bit rate was much higher on this movie.

Once again it played fine. So I sat there, and sat there some more until eventually a smug smile came across my face. About one third into the movie it began to stutter and stutter extremely badly. Now I know that this movie plays just fine on other SMP8634/35 players I have around, so I double checked the network to ascertain if any other of my horde were stressing the LAN out. But no, no other user or device was utilizing the network.

I stopped at this stage and copied the file across to a USB HDD to eliminate the LAN completely. Upon resuming 3/10 to Yuma the stutter still appeared after a while of playing the movie. I tried another high bit rate MKV movie and this also suffered from stutter. I then downgraded to a 720p movie and service was resumed.

Conclusion is as expected with the 8623L chip; it can handle files up to 1080p but not the heavy ones. As usual with this line of players, we‟d recommend sticking with 720p. I continued to try out WMV, .TS HD movies and they all ran fine at 1080p and 720p, so could there be a problem with the firmware‟s handling of HD MKV‟s? (I say this because other 8623L based players have no issues with these exact same files).

All standard definition (SD) content played fine without any hitches, glitches or crashes. One bug bare for me though is when playing a movie the LCD turns grey and remain lit, this can be very annoying when watching a movie in a dark room, additionally there should be an option to dim the blue front panel LED‟s. Anyway I digress.

A nice feature is the detail that the “Go To” feature has. It displays the Go To time along with the current and total time, this appeared to work well. The bookmark feature also worked very well and was extremely simple to use. I was soon bookmarking several places in movies and TV episodes; flicking between them was done with ease.

Another nice feature was the „slow‟ option this worked extremely well and allowed me to slow the movie down in stages until it was by frames, for both SD and HD media.

As mentioned in the introduction Hantech have stated that original DVD movie playback is possible from an external USB DVD player due to the acquisition of CSS license. We took a short test and it actually worked :)

2 INCH LCD COLOR SCREEN

Well it had to come sooner or later and certainly there has been demand for the inclusion of such a screen. The Markus 800 LCD screen is a color version and has sharpness and definition. The use of icons eases reading the display though 2” is not big, so from a distance you cannot read anything.

The menu when presented on the screen is clearly defined and colorful and Novatron have made good use of color defined areas and icons. Initially you are presented with the media selection menu. From here you can drill down to choose your selected file, be it audio, movie, or photo. The menu system performs smoothly and is responsive to user selection. However, and there is always a but somewhere, the menu system appears to be static, meaning that if an MP3 file is selected which uses a long file name, the Markus fails to scroll the name. This flaw means selection is often a guessing game in this instance when using the artist first like in Barry White – You‟re the first, the last, my everything”. Up to 16 characters are displayed on each line.

Hopefully this can be corrected via a firmware update which we will pursue with Hantech but chances are slim as the display pretty much looks programmed separately from the firmware (Hi-Jack‟s comments). Overall the inclusion of the screen is a positive step forward for media players and besides the stated flaws, the player is executed it well.

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