One major feature that makes this player different than most other DVD players is its ability to stream content from the Internet and as well as browse the Internet.  While its built in Internet browser may lack many features of a PC based browser, such as the ability to support Javascript drop-down menus, pop-up windows and so on, it is enough to get around online to stream downloadable clips and listen to live online audio & video streams without having to know or enter the exact URLs of them. 

The player comes with a fixed link to the Helios portal site on its menu and gives the option to add extra media portal sites.  As this takes regular URLs, it is possible to use this as a sort of bookmark feature for easy access to specific websites.  For example, in the following screenshot, the default “HELIOS Media Portal Site” is shown, along with the Shoutcast, Google and Lyngsat Net TV links we added to test:

The ‘Edit’ button at the bottom allows us to edit all but the fixed Helios media portal link.  On the editor page, it is possible to store up to five sites:

While it is not clear in the manual or indicated on the remote, capital letters can be entered by pressing the ‘DVD Top Menu’ key.  When this key is pressed, the player toggles between lowercase, uppercase and numeric key entry. 

HELIOS Media Portal Site

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To start with, we will briefly show what it is available at the Helios portal site.  Unlike a NeoLink source, the Helios portal site is not dependant on any PC on the network and can easily be run directly solely connected to a broadband internet connection.  As this page is online, the online pages in this section may have changed since the time of writing this review.

On the homepage shown above, it gives a choice of “Tips & Tricks”, “Online Music”, “Online TV”, “Online News” and “PODCAST”. 

Tips & Tricks

This page gives a list of tips & tricks for the player, much like a set of FAQs, listing links to five tips per page:

Online Music

When we go into this section, it gives a choice of five categories of music:

While at a first glance it appears like the portal give a good selection of online music stations, unfortunately it turns out that each category only has a few stations, where the links don’t appear to have been maintained in a while, at least from our experience at this time of writing.  Out of all the stations listed, only four links were valid, with three giving “Unknown Format”, leaving just one station being playable.  The rest of the links either gave page not found errors or simply returned back to the station listing page the moment they were selected.

On the station that did work (KCME in the classical section), it took about 50 seconds to buffer before it started playing.  Once playback starts, the screen remains completely black.  While we are unsure if it is just station, the key responses are very slow while streaming.  For example, if we press the ‘Info’ button to show the info, at first we thought this key had no effect until the info finally appeared around 30 seconds later. 

For a decent selection of online radio stations, we would recommend having a look at Shoutcast or Lyngsat’s Net Radio section.

Online TV

The online TV page shows a list of online TV stations, although not in categories like the music section:

However, of the seven stations that were listed, only two of them actually worked, one without sound, suggesting that this section has not been maintained in a while either.  Again, this may have changed since this time of writing.  The buffering time of both was much better than with the radio station that worked, taking 12 seconds from the time we selected the station until it came up.  The ‘Info’ button was a little more responsive, but still taking a few seconds for the info to appear or hide.

Online News

The news section appears to be based on RSS feeds, with each news site link listing the latest headlines.

Once we select a news site, it lists the latest headlines from that site.  The following shows an example from Yahoo Business / Financial at this time of writing:

If select a headline, the website comes up with that headline, much like viewing an RSS feed link:

Podcast

The Podcast section lists a selection of news podcasts:

Once we select a podcast, it begins playing back within a couple of seconds.  During playback, the title of the podcast is shown on screen.

NeoLink Online Media

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If we go into the “Online Media” section of a NeoLink server source, we get another selection of online sources.  However, unlike the Helios media portal, this section can only be accessed with a PC running NeoLink is present on the network.

As the list of services is likely to change from the time this review since NeoLink does not have any option to customise what appears here, we will just test ‘Podcast Alley’ as an example.  In this section, we get a list of the top 10 and newest podcasts from PodcastAlley.com:

Interestingly, besides a title, the podcasts here show a logo during playback of the podcast.  The following shows an example of what appears while playing the “Nobody Likes Onions” podcast:

On the second page of NeoLink’s “Online Media”, we can access the bookmarks stored on the user’s web browser on the PC NeoLink Server is running on, including sub-folders.  NeoLink’s server software gives a choice of using Mozilla’s or Internet Explorer’s favourites.  This is updated in real-time, which means that as soon as a bookmark is updated, it is also updated on the player.

Finally, the Yahoo news section lists some of the top Yahoo stories, much like the Yahoo news section in the Helios media portal.  In this case, it gives a preview of the story and if we select the right arrow, it takes us to the actual Yahoo news webpage with the full story.

Other online multimedia content

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Besides the NeoLink online media and the Helios media portal, we are free to browse to other multimedia websites and to a limited extent, check e-mail, browse public discussion forums and so on.  Unfortunately, as we mentioned earlier, its web browser capabilities are very limited and seems to lack most CSS support, making it difficult to browse websites that rely on Javascript driven menus, flash or other plug-ins. 

The remote control has a ‘URL’ button to allow the user to jump directly to a given URL. 

Shoutcast

In our first example, we will type in the URL for Shoutcast:

Once we press ‘OK’, the website begins to load up.  Unlike a PC browser, the player will not allow us to navigate or select links until the page has either fully loaded or we stop the loading process.  Despite being connected to the same broadband connection as our PC, web pages also take significantly longer to load up than on a PC.  For example, the Shoutcast homepage takes 16 second to load up on the player, while it takes just 4 seconds on the PC after clearing our browser temporary Internet files cache. 

The following image shows the Shoutcast website loaded on the player at this time of writing:

As there is no mouse to click on links, links can be selected using the player’s navigation keys and pressing ‘OK’ to click the link.  Pages can be scrolled using the volume +/- keys.  Like on a PC browser, it is also possible to fill in forms, such as fields, drop-down selection boxes, tick boxes, radio buttons and so on.  As our screen resolution is set to PAL in order to capture the screenshots with our capture card, it is possible to fit more information on the screen using the HD browser mode with a higher resolution output.

In the following screenshot, we have scrolled down to the list of stations:

Like on the PC, all we need to do to play a station is click the stream link.  In the following screenshot, we have chosen the popular Club977 80’s radio station and have pressed ‘Info’ to show the extra info on-screen:

During playback of a radio station, one thing we find interesting is the ability to pause a live radio station and continue where it leaves off a moment later.  However, it is not possible to “fast-forward” or “rewind” live radio like with a PVR and it is not possible to record from the radio either.  It also does not seem to be possible to stream AAC+ tracks on Shoutcast, as the player incorrectly detects them as MP3 streams resulting in noise from the speakers.

Lyngsat

Like the Shoutcast website, the Lyngsat website comes up not far off how it looks on a PC browser.

While Lyngsat lists a fairly lengthy list of online streaming radio stations, unfortunately the vast majority of them are in either Real Audio or Streaming Windows Media Audio format.  Even though the player is capable of playing Windows Media Audio files, from our testing, it will not stream most live Windows Media Audio stations, as ASX links give ‘Unknown Format’ and links beginning with ‘MSS’ give ‘Unknown Protocol’. 

So for this section, we will show an example of using the player for streaming an online television station.  First, we go into the ‘nettv’ section on the right (or go directly to www.lyngsat.com/nettv) and then select the country we would like to watch streaming TV from.  In this screenshot, we navigated down the page to the country selection list:

Due to the large list of online stations in Germany, for our example, we will choose this country:

Like with the streaming radio stations, the player will only stream certain types of streaming stations, playing only a handful of all the Net TV stations we have tried.  Most links simply return back to the current page or display the following error if they start with ‘mms://’:

For an example of what we found to work, we will choose ‘Deluxe Music’.  In this case, it took 11 seconds from the time of selecting it to the time the station started playing.  Despite the low bitrate with this station, we are impressed to see how well this player handles such a low bitrate station.  On the other hand, despite restarting the playback of this station a few times, the audio kept going out of sync with the video, despite playing in sync on the PC. 

The following screenshot was taken when the music channel displayed its song title information:

We can get its info by pressing the ‘Info’ button.  However, like playing back a video stream through the Helios media portal, it can take a couple of seconds for the info to display after the info button is pressed.

Web browsing

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As we mentioned earlier, the player is not restricted to just websites that stream content.  While the following screenshots show browsing using standard definition, we suggest using the HD browsing mode when connected up to a high definition display. 

The following screenshot shows an example of the Yahoo homepage:

As seen in the above screenshot, some websites may limit the amount of content they display as they do not recognise the browser this player uses.  The following shows an example of accessing e-mail in Yahoo; in this case an obsolete account that just collects spam now:

Websites that rely heavily on CSS or Javascript tend to have problems displaying.  A good example here is the CDFreaks home page, where it does not seem to be possible to browse much here.  On the home page, there is little much more shown than what can be seen in the following screenshot:

If we go into the News section and try scrolling down the page, the cursor sometimes gets locked in the search field.  So far while we have not encountered this particular issue on any other website, it does seem like a bug with the player’s browser software.  The only way to get out of this is to refresh the page.

Playing content & Playback features

HD Upscaling Performance