In this page, we carry out various tests such as to see which audio codec bit rates it supports, what types of video are supported and high bitrate video.  For those interested in playing discs from outside of their DVD region, we will do tests with discs from different regions.

Audio Tests:

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As this DVD player is capable of playing WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, Wave and MPEG4/AAC audio files, some may ask about what bit rates and modes of each codec are supported.  For example, WMA could mean WMA standard, WMA professional, WMA voice, WMA VBR or WMA DRM, not to mention the choice of bit rates also. 

For these tests, we used Goldwave to create different Wave formats, LAME 3.96.1 to create different MP3 formats, Windows Media Encoder 9 series to create different WMA formats, FLAC 1.1.3 to re-encode the Wave files to use as test FLAC files, OGG Vorbis v2.83 (libvorbis aoTuVr1) to test the Ogg format at various quality levels and iTunes to test MPEG4 audio at several different bitrates and formats.

As we mentioned earlier in this review, we got noisy audio each the time drive would spin up or slow down a disc if we were playing audio files from CD/DVD.  This issue would occur regardless of what audio codec we were testing.  The noise buzzes like a power hum when it occurs.

Wave Audio

As Wave audio does not need much processing besides resampling it to suit the internal DAC, we have only done a limited number of tests on wave audio, which includes different bit depths, sample rates and channels to basically cover from the lowest to the highest bit rates one is likely to encounter.  As this player features a Wolfson 2 Channel 24bit/192khz Stereo DAC, it should in theory be able to support up to 192kHz 24bit audio wave files, so for this test we have covered up this as well as a handful of 32-bit audio tests. 

The test results are as follows:

As we have no problems playing back 24-bit stereo 96kHz wave files from over the network, assuming that the software passes all 24-bits of audio to the DAC, this player has no problem playing high resolution uncompressed stereo wave files.  However, when it came to the 32-bit audio tests, we got an error saying that only 8 bit and 16 bit audio is supported.  On the other hand, it was a pity to see it fail to play 192kHz audio files, even from our portable USB hard disk.

FLAC Audio

FLAC is an open source lossless compression format for audio files.  Unlike MP3, WMA, MPEG4 and other audio formats, FLAC retains every bit of the original audio, ensuring no loss of sound quality when uncompressed again, exactly like how Zip files retain every bit of information of the source files.  The advantage with FLAC over Wave is its ability to reduce the size of audio down to around 60% of its original size on average.  

In this test, we have compressed our wave test files into the FLAC format and tested the files that successfully compressed.  Unfortunately, the FLAC encoder did not support our 192kHz wave samples. 

The test results are as follows:

Unlike our wave tests, the player only supported a handful of our FLAC test files.  While it is nice to see it supporting up to 96kHz, unfortunately it was unable to handle any of the 24-bit FLAC files.  For example, the 24-bit 44kHz file causes the player to crash, while the 24-bit 96kHz file simply refuses to play.  Hopefully a future firmware update will add support for 24-bit FLAC files.

MP3 Audio

As MP3 is still the most widely used audio format when it comes to consumers carrying their music on the move or downloading it online, some may ask what bit rates it supports or whether it plays variable bit rate, etc.  When encoding MP3, we left LAME to decide on the sample rate and MPEG version.  We will also test free-format bit rates in which the MP3 is encoded at a non-standard bit rate, such as 125kbps for example. 

The Sample rates and MPEG Versions LAME used for CBR encoding are as follows:

The Sample rates and MPEG Versions LAME used for VBR encoding are as follows:

For the Free-format bit rate tests, we tested 88kbps and 152kbps to be in-between the regular bit rates and still be a multiple of 8, 125kbps to test a bit-rate that is both non-standard and not a multiple of 8 and finally a handful of bitrates from 328kbps to 640kbps in multiples of 8kbps. 

The results of all the MP3 tests are as follows:

While it is nice to see every standard CBR and VBR bit rate supported, it is really impressive to see the support of non-standard bit rates, particularly those beyond 320kbps.  We tested the maximum free-format bit-rate of 640kbps and confirm this plays without issue also.

WMA Audio

As pretty much everyone has Windows Media player installed on their PC and many use it to rip their music into WMA (often without realising it), it is handy to be able to play Windows Media audio also.  Note that this player does not support WMA DRM natively, which means that Windows Media Player's copy protection feature must be disabled unless the user plans on using Windows Media Connect exclusively to play DRM protected music on the player.  When WMA version 9 came out, Microsoft added a professional WMA format as well as a Voice WMA format to this version, so these tests will cover testing out these special versions of WMA. 

As Windows Media encoder gives so many combinations of bit rates, sample rates and options for encoding WMA, we have grouped bit-rates for a sample rate together to shorten the table when ever a group all passed.  For a few bit rates, Windows Media Encoder gave a 'Low Delay' option by default, so in these few cases, there is an '*' beside the bit rate.

Note:  * = Low Delay

Unlike the MP3 format, the player will only play some of WMA's standard bit rate encodings.  On the few low bit rates 8kHz it fails on, it is unlikely one is going to encounter an encoding at this low rate.  Even the majority of low bit streaming WMA radio stations and download able voice clips are encoded at least 22kHz.  The player will play all variable and average bit rate encodings, however it will not play any of the Voice or WMA Professional test clips; displaying “Invalid WMA file” if we attempt to play any of these.  We were quite surprised at its inability to play the WMA Professional clips considering it mentions that WMA professional is supported in the specifications and it will play Windows Media Video files with a WMA professional audio track. 

MPEG4 Audio

With the iPod leading the portable audio player market and iTunes the leading application to interface with the iPod, consumers who rip their CDs with iTunes will end up with 128kbps CBR MPEG4 audio files if encoded at the default settings.  Since this player is designed to play MPEG4 audio, we will test a handful of audio files created by iTunes at the most commonly used bit-rates as well as test files created by the freeware FAAC command line tool and Nero Digital’s command line encoder. 

The results for our iTunes encoded samples are as follows:

As expected, all our iTunes samples have played successfully.  Due to the time it takes to prepare each encoding in iTunes, we have limited our selection of test samples to the above, which we believe to be the most commonly used.

In order to see what other sample rates the player supported in AAC/MPEG4 audio, we used the freeware command line tool FAAC to encode test files with common sample rates ranging from 8kHz to 96,000Hz, including one mono test in both the MPEG2 AAC and MPEG4 M4A formats.  Unfortunately, the encoder had issues trying to encode with the 192,000Hz sample rate, so we left this sample rate out.  We let the encoder use its default bitrate setting and VBR encoding method, with the average bitrate for each sample shown in the table.  The results are as follows:

All of the tests besides the 88,200Hz AAC test played without any issue.  Interestingly, while the 88,200 AAC file played without any audible sound, the 88,200 M4A file played without any issue.

Unfortunately when it came to our Nero Digital tests, the player was not able to play any of them.  First, we tried playing several test samples with the MP4 extension, however the player would return to the file selection if we attempted to play any from a data disc and would not list them as audio files through NeoLink.  We then tried changing the extension to AAC, but got an error saying “Invalid AAC file” on each test file.  Finally, we tried the M4A extension as used by iTunes and while the player would show the files as playing, no sound came out.  We tried using Low Complexity (HC), High Efficiency (HE) and High Efficiency v2 (HEV2) at 64kbps and 128kbps to start with, all resulting in the same issue.

OGG Vorbis Audio

Finally, we try out one of the most popular open source non proprietary audio codec’s.  This audio codec has come on a long way since it became publicly available and already outperforms most of the common audio codec’s at 128kbps, a popular bitrate used for distributing music online at.  However, its limited hardware support has likely prevented this codec from competing successfully with MP3.

As OGG Vorbis has been designed to be used as a VBR codec, for this test we have tested it at quality levels ranging from -2 to 10, which gives an average of 40kbps to 558kbps respectively for our 44,100Hz 16-bit stereo test sample. 

Like with MP3, this player handles all the standard quality levels for OGG Vorbis ranging from the minimum quality to the maximum quality the Vorbis encoder supports, making the player ideal for those who are interested in using the OGG Vorbis format or already have a collection built up encoded in this format.  When it comes to sample rates outside of 44,100Hz, it has no problem handling encodings all the way down to 8,000Hz and up to 88,000Hz.  However, while it played our Q3 and Q5 encoded 96,000Hz files fine, the player would play several seconds of noisy audio once it would begin playing back a Q10 encoded 96,000Hz file, which had a ~1Mbps average bitrate.  However, a few seconds, the audio would play fine for the remainder of the file.  All our OGG encodings at 192,000Hz played back with noise.

Video Tests:

This player is capable of playing a wide variety of video formats including MPEG 1/2/4, Windows Media Video, XviD, DivX, Nero Digital, QuickTime MPEG4 and Transport stream files.  However, like with the audio tests, it is not clear what its limitations are on each codec.  So, in this set of tests, we will test what MPEG4 features the player supports (using XviD), what versions of WMV it supports (including WMV9 AP used in VC1) and determine roughly what is the maximum bitrate the player is capable of playing MPEG4 and Windows Media Video at.  We used the introduction of Brainiac (which has a lot of action) as the source for the XviD MPEG4 tests and a 1080i (1920 x 1080) 60Hz 18.4Mbps MPEG2 file as the source for each encoding, which also has plenty of motion. 

XviD/MPEG4 Encoding Feature Test

While this player is capable of playing DivX, XviD, Nero Digital and other MPEG4 files, it is unclear which MPEG4 encoding features it will handle.  For example, a DVD player that can play XviD files may not support Global Motion Compensation (GMC) or an AVI file with AC3 audio.  So, for these tests we will use XviD's different advanced encoding features and see how the player reacts to each encoded file. 

The source file is a PAL video clip taken from a DVD containing a mixture of still scenes, full screen motion, partial motion (such as a person walking) and random motion such as TNT explosions.  Apart from one clip with a resolution of 528 x 576 (for the aspect ratio test), all of our clips were sourced from a 720 x 576 video source.  We used quality based encoding (Quality 10) with the default XviD options except with 1 B-VOP max, packed bitstream disabled and the encoding features specified in the table.

The first two tests basically ensured that the player could smoothly at the default encoding parameters used in the other tests as well as at a higher bitrate. Higher bitrate tests are covered further down this page when we test HD encoding.  While the video became jittery with the maximum B-VOP count set to two without packed bitstream, it played back smooth when we enabled packed bitstream, a feature well known to cause jittery playback on hardware players rather than prevent it. 

On the test with the aspect ratio issue, this can be overcome by pressing the ‘Zoom’ button to select the “Fit to screen” option.  If the aspect ratio is still wrong, this can generally be fixed by first setting the zoom to “Fit to screen” and then set the TV to the correct aspect ratio, assuming the TV has an aspect ratio selection feature.  Finally, while encoding the wrong interlacing mode generally causes no issue with some players, such as the LVW-1105HC+, this player will show a shaky picture if we select the interlaced source without the top field option for our test sample.

WMV Version Test

Microsoft Windows Media Video comes in three common versions - 7, 8 and 9.  More recently, Microsoft introduced an Advanced Profile for version 9, which is used in VC1.  In these tests, we used a standard definition test clip from Brainiac, encoded the video at 2Mbps with 64kbps audio.  We kept the same settings for each version test:

While we would have expected this player to be backwards compatible with WMV 7 and 8, unfortunately our tests show that this player will only play WMV9.  With a wide range of Windows Media 7 & 8 content still about online, not to mention streaming video services still using version 7 or 8, this really limits the amount of WMV content this player will support.

MPEG2 HD

To start with, we played back the 1080i 60Hz 18.4Mbps MPEG2 sample we had, which ran for just over 5 minutes.  This played back with good sharp detail and without any sign of frame dropping throughout the clip from a USB disc hard drive, a DVD-RW disc and over a wired network.  However, when we attempted to play it over its Wireless connection, it would only play if the PC was attached to the access point with a network cable and if the player was in a short distance from the access point.  Even still, any interference, such as from a portable phone would cause playback over Wi-Fi to drop frames. 

As a second test, we made a 30 minute recording from Astra’s HD demo satellite channel and played this back on the player from a DVD-RW disc.  Like the first sample, this was also 1080i at about 18.5Mbps, but at 50Hz.  This also played without any sign of losing frames from start to finish.  For the 60Hz playback, we tried both ‘720p’ and ‘1080i’ as the video output modes and for the 50Hz Astra HD sample, we tried both the ‘720p 50Hz’ and ‘1080i 50Hz’ video output modes to match the content.

Finally, we tried a handful of other 1080i and 720p clips, all playing back without issue from DVD-RW and a USB hard drive. 

MPEG4 HD

For the XviD tests in HD, we used VirtualDubMod and set the XviD profile to ‘HDTV’.  For its encoding, we set a maximum of 1-BVOP and left all the other settings as default.  We then encoded the video at a variety of bitrates at both 720p and 1080p, 30 frames per second, some with 2-pass encoding, some with managed bitrate (to significantly reduce encoding time) and one quality based with a quality value of 2.  All tests were played back from a combination of a USB hard drive, a DVD-RW disc and a network.

The results are as follows:

From what we can see, this player should have no problem playing any XviD HD clip out there, so long as it was encoded using the supported MPEG4 features.  The main reason we started at 1.5Mbps is due to the manual mentioning that 1.5Mbps is the maximum supported bitrate.  However, we were really impressed to see it not only play a file exceeding this bitrate, but also play at up to the limit of the XviD HDTV profile of 9,708kbps. 

As the 1-pass Quality 2 encoded has a bitrate that totally varies depending on the detail in the picture, at one point, the player struggled to play back two scenes over the network and one scene from DVD in the five minute clip.  To our surprise, the scene it played from DVD, but not over the network was peaking at about 27Mbps and the second scene it struggled at from both sources peaked at 50Mbps.  For it to play peaking at 27Mbps (for about 1 second) from at least DVD without any signs of dropping frames, this clearly shows that its hardware will handy very high bitrate HD files, even outside of the MPEG4 High Profile standard.

WMV HD

Microsoft has long been trying to push its Windows Media Audio and Video technology and has been offering a showcase of WMV HD samples in both 720p and 1080p.  We have tried a handful of its public 720p and 1080p WMV9 encoded trailers, all playing back with very smooth results.  However, as the clips were typically encoded between 8Mbps and 10Mbps, we decided to go further by trying out WMV at its maximum bitrate of 20Mbps at 1080p, 30 frames per second.  When we began playback of the 20Mbps clip, the video played smooth from the very start, however the first few seconds of audio was broken up.  After this, the video and audio played fine throughout the remainder of the file, so while 20Mbps is at the edge of playability, this means that users will be able to play pretty much any HD sample they come across, however when it comes to a 20Mbps encoding, only the first few seconds give any issue.

Like with the standard definition WMV tests, we tried out WMV7, 8 and WMV9 AP at 1080p also, but unfortunately with the same error messages on each test.  With Microsoft pushing WMV9 AP due to this being part of the VC1 codec, there will unlikely be much more WMV9 HD content produced.  For example, it has been a while since Microsoft even last updated its WMV9 HD showcase.

JPEG Picture Tests

With the recent huge growth of digital camera usage, it is nice to be able to show pictures on a TV for others to see.  A disc also takes up a lot less space than a photo album and it is much easier to show photos to a large group of people than with a physical photo album.  As we showed earlier in the review, the advantage with this player is that it will also show photos in high definition modes, unlike regular DVD players or direct view from the camera’s video-out, which both limit the output to 480i or 576i. 

Unlike audio files which have specific standard bit-rates, JPEG images can consist of virtually any dimension, quality or file size, like with video files.  So, the purpose of this test is to see which common resolutions can this player supports as well as the length of time each image takes to load.  We started with a 6 Megapixel image and used Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9 to resample the image to each resolution shown in the table below.  For each Megapixel rating, we adjusted the size such that it would have roughly the number of pixels as the Megapixel rating.  For example, for the 3 Megapixel image, we resized the image to 2000 x 1500.  All apart from two images have an aspect ratio of 4:3.  The two remaining images with dimensions of 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080 have their aspect ratio adjusted such that the full image area was taken.  The loading time is the time it takes from our 120GB USB 2.5” portable hard disk.

While the loading times are not as quick as on a PC, they load up much quicker than on the Helios 2085 upscaling player, particularly with images of over 1 Megapixel.  For cameras that feature a mass-storage USB capability, this would make the player ideal for playing back photos directly from a camera, not to mention the ability to show them at high definition, unlike that from the video-out of most (if not all) digital cameras.

As we mentioned earlier, the player can also display photos as a slideshow, which means that the loading time in this case is not really an issue. 

Miscellaneous USB Devices

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While this player is designed to support USB mass-storage devices such as flash pen drives and external hard disks, we were curious to see what other USB storage devices this player may support.  For example, most consumers read back their digital memory cards using multi-flash card readers and if this player supports one of these, it would make it a lot easier to show photographs on the TV.  In this section, we will test a camera with Picture Transfer Protocol support, a multi-flash card reader, an external DVD drive and a USB hub. 

In these tests, we have the browser mode set to the HD mode to show more info in each screenshot.

Picture Transfer Protocol

With many modern cameras using the PTP handle instead of mass-storage device capability over USB, the first test we will do here is connect up our FujiFilm F30 camera to the player to see if it comes up as a drive or allows the browsing of its photos.

When we hooked up the camera, the following message briefly flashed up on the screen:

Unfortunately, no drive letter came up for the camera, which means that the player does not support the Picture Transfer Protocol.

Multi-Flash Memory Card Reader

The vast majority of consumers who use flash memory cards will have some sort of flash memory card reader, with the 4-slot multi-flash memory card readers being the most common.  For this test, we will connect up a 7DayShop own-brand USB2 multi-flash memory reader. 

Within a few seconds of plugging in the memory card reader, the player showed the following:

The “USB SD Reader” line changed to “USB CF Reader”, “USB SM Reader” and “USB MS Reader” in sequence before the message disappeared.  After a couple of seconds, all four slots came up like drives on a PC:

To check whether it is possible to read from the slots, we tried an SD flash card and an XD picture card, both accessible like with plugging in a USB flash pen drive.  We tried a handful of images, audio files and video files, all playing back successfully as from our portable hard disk.  We also tried another multi-card reader we had handy and had no issue using that also.  The following shows an example of the listing from the XD card:

The main advantage with being able to use a multi-flash memory card reader is that users do not need to worry about proprietary camera connection methods, never mind requiring the cable itself to hook up the camera to the player.  As long as there is a multi-memory card reader hooked up, it is just a matter of taking the memory card out of the camera and popping it into the reader.  As the player has two built-in USB slots this allows the user to have another USB drive plugged in at the same time without having to swap between the two.

External CD / DVD drive

While this player already has a built-in DVD-ROM drive, we were curious to see if the player would handle an external DVD-ROM drive hooked up to its USB port.  So for this test, we tried connecting up a NEC-3520A DVD writer and an older Lite-On LTR-40125 CD writer up to the player using an IDE to USB adaptor cable. 

When we connected up the Lite-On CD writer, it came up as a drive like connecting up a USB mass-storage device.  However, when we tried accessing the drive (with a data CD loaded containing test files), it should show an egg timer and go no further:

We then tried again, but using the NEC DVD writer this time.  Unfortunately it would only show up as an empty disk, regardless of what we loaded in the drive.  We also tried connecting it up with a disc already placed in the drive. 

USB Hub

As a final test, we were curious to see whether it would be possible to access devices through a USB hub connected to the player.  For example, while the player already has two USB ports, it may be useful to connect more than two USB drives to the player.  For example, one may have several USB hard drives containing HD video content and if they can all be connected up through a USB hub, it would save the need of switching between USB cables to the drive each time the user wants to access something on a different drive. 

When we hooked up the Hub, the following message briefly showed:

As the player seemed to recognise the hub, we tried hooking up several USB devices to the hub, however the player did not detect anything that was connected to the hub.

Multi-region testing:

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One thing consumers often check out for before purchasing a particular DVD player is to see if it is multi-regional capable.  While neither the manual nor player mentions anything about its region, we will test out DVDs from three different regions that we have handy to see if they play.  The following table shows the region codes printed on the back of each DVD case as well as the movie titles:

Garfield & Friends

Cats & Dogs

The Sixth Sense

First, we will try our Region 1 NTSC DVD:

The above clearly shows that this is able to play a DVD outside of our region where this review took place.  Just in case this happens to be a Region 1 player, we will test a disc from Region 2:

Finally as a last test, we will test a disc DVD Region 4:

As this player has no problem accepting DVDs from the above regions, it is fairly clear that this is a multi-regional player, making it also ideal for those who have an existing DVD collection from different regions and plan on replacing their existing region free player or plan to purchase DVDs during their next holiday located in another region.  The advantage here is that the average consumer will not need to worry about finding out what the 'secret remote' key is, not to mention encountering a DVD player which requires a physical hardware modification or add-on to make it multi-regional.  However, as we do not have any Region Code Enhanced protected discs handy, we are unsure whether this player will play such discs.

High Definition vs. Standard Definition

Conclusion