Depending on the type of content being played and where it is being played from, the controls and the way it plays can vary significantly.  Even the way the track titles appear vary from source to source, for example, on a Windows Media Connect source, it generally shows the track’s titles only, on a data disc or USB device, it shows files of up to a certain number of characters, while on a NeoLink source, it shows audio & video titles up to the width of the field. 

When we go to play music, video or picture files regardless of the source, the player behaves differently depending on whether we begin playback with the ‘Play’ button or with the ‘OK’ button.  If we select a track and press ‘OK’, as expected the player will begin playing the current file.  However, it will not allow automatically go to the next file once this one finishes, but instead returns to the folder list.  Also, the repeat-all/random and next/previous track buttons are disabled, displaying ‘Invalid’ if pressed.  It is possible to repeat the current track by pressing the ‘Refresh’ key. 

If we begin playback using the ‘Play’ button, the player will begin from the first item in the sub-folder regardless of the selected item or from the current item in NeoLink and play the tracks in sequence.  With this method, it is possible to navigate between tracks using the next & previous track buttons.  We are not sure why the ‘Refresh’ button functions as the ‘Repeat’ mode selection, despite the remote having an actual ‘Repeat’ button on it, but interestingly if we press the ‘Repeat’ button, it shows ‘Invalid’.  The repeat options are “Repeat One”, “Repeat All”, “Random”, Repeat Random” and “Repeat Off”.  This function will work with sub-folders also.  There does not seem to be any Repeat A-B capability however when playing files.

Unlike other DVD players we have seen that plays media files, this player will play combinations of different file formats in sequence or as part of the Repeat/Random feature.  For example, if we have a folder containing a mixture of music, video and pictures (even if in sub-folders) and press play, the player will play the full lot in sequence or in a random order. 

Playing Music Content

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Unlike most DVD players that are limited to MP3 and WMA, this player will also recognise AAC, MP4, OGG, FLAC and WAV files and can handle folders containing a combination of file formats, playing them as if they were just of the one type.  We’ll cover tests involving the different codec’s later in the review, but for now we’ll look at playing back audio files in general.

When playing back audio files, the player has an interesting seeking function in that one can jump to a given percentage of the song by pressing the number keys on the remote, where 0 is 0%, 1 is 10% and so on up to 9 being 90%.  The left & right keys move back and forth by 1% respectively:

On the other hand, the player does lack the ability to fast forward or rewind in a song, which we are quite surprised about, considering virtually every DVD player we came across can do this.  If we press the fast forward or rewind buttons, we get ‘Invalid’, so the closest to being able to do this is by using the left & right arrow keys to move through the song by the percent.  For lengthy audio tracks, such as 2-hour long concert recording, seeking by the percent may not be as practical, since 1 percent may navigate by over a minute’s worth of audio, although it is possible to jump to a given point by pressing the ‘Search’ button.

If the audio file is a multilingual sound, such as an audiobook with two different language mono channels, it is possible to select between individual tracks by pressing the ‘Audio’ button. 

NeoLink

One nice feature with NeoLink is the ability to display photographs during the playback of music by specifying a photo folder for a given music folder, as shown earlier in this review on Page 4.  If no folder is specified, NeoLink will show its default set of images in sequence.  It starts with a moonlit lighthouse:

If cover art is present, it will be shown.  While this may be useful in some cases, the cover art is not fitted to the screen size and it does not seem to be possible to show a slide show of photos when cover art is present:

Windows Media Connect

Unlike playing back music in NeoLink, we just get a plain black background during the playback of music with Windows Media Connect:

Data Disc and USB Disk

When playing back music from either a USB disk or a data disc, we get the Helios logo as the background:

As the screensaver does not take effect during the playback of music, this is one of the few cases where one could end up having screen burn-in with a CRT, plasma or other phosphor based display, since this logo remains static during playback.  The only exception is the playback of MPEG4 files with the MP4 extension in which the player shows a black screen during playback.  Interestingly, MP4 audio files are shown up with a video reel icon in the file listing as shown in the 5^th listing of the following screenshot.  As the player only shows the first 28 characters for data discs and USB disks, the file extensions are not visible here:

One quite annoying issue with the logo is that it makes it makes it difficult to read the on-screen information when we press the Info button on the remote:

When playing back audio files from a CD data disc, the audio would distort each time the drive sped up or slowed down the disc.  This can be quite annoying when sampling through tracks, since every couple of track navigations usually results in the drive spinning up the disc, only for it to slow down again a few seconds later, producing noisy audio each time this occurs.  However, this issue does not occur with any data DVDs we have tried. 

Audio CD

This player’s navigation controls behave quite different when playing back a regular Audio CD than when playing back files.  To start with, the numeric keys jump to a given track on the CD, unlike seeking to a percentage when playing files.  The fast forward & rewind keys seek at a fixed 8x.  The arrow keys are unused and just display ‘Invalid’ if pressed.

The player offers several repeat options during playback.  The ‘Repeat’ button gives a choice of ‘Repeat Track’, ‘Repeat Disc’, ‘Repeat Random’ and ‘Repeat Cleared’ and the ‘Server Home’ button functions as Repeat A-B.  Unlike playing back audio files, the ‘Refresh’ button has no effect while playing CDs. 

During playback, the Helios logo is displayed continuously, like with playing audio files from a data disc or a USB drive.  The current track & time can be displayed by pressing the ‘Info’ button, although it is difficult to make out due to the logo: 

Like with playing back audio files from a data disc or a USB drive, if the display is a CRT, plasma or has some other phosphor based screen, we would recommend turning off the display during CD playback to avoid potential screen burn-in.

Playing Video Content

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This DVD player features a wide range of Video formats and extensions, such as AVI, MPG, MP4, WMV, TS and TRP.  We’ll cover tests in these codec’s later in the review, but for now we’ll look at the video file controls in general.

Like playing back audio files, this player has quite a neat seeking feature in that one can jump to the 10% mark by pressing 1, 20% mark by pressing 2 and so on.  It is also possible to move back and forward by 1% by pressing the left and right keys respectively.  Finally, one can jump to a given point on the disk by pressing the ‘Search’ button and keying in the time to seek to.  Unlike playing music files, it is possible to fast forward and rewind using these standard remote keys.  From an XviD encoding of a DVD recording we have, the four fast forwarding speeds work out at around 20x, 40x, 80x and 120x.  The four rewinding speeds work out a lot slower at 9x, 13x, 21x and 27x.  The speeds seem to vary depending on the content and source, particularly over a network, for example, the reported navigation speed here is from an XviD file on a USB flash disk. 

The Info button will show a limited amount of information on screen, basically indicating the audio & video codec being played, the file name, current position and resolution:

Like audio file playback, it is possible to switch between mono left & right for video files that contain two mono sound tracks or between two separate stereo sound tracks if present in the file.  When it comes to video files of unusual resolutions, such as DVB recording from satellite, it is possible zoom them to fit to screen or to the full screen using the ‘Zoom’ button.  There is no option to switch between the 16:9 and 4:3 aspect, but then again most modern TV sets can switch between aspect ratios

Whether we play video file content from a data disc, USB drive, a NeoLink Server source or Windows Media Connect, the controls all appear to function the same. 

DVD Video

While many DVD players have various on-screen menus to control playback, such as the Helios HVD2085 upscaling DVD player, this player does not provide any on-screen option menus for DVD playback.  Instead, like some of the earlier DVD players, all the controls are on the remote.  As the operation of some controls are common on pretty much all DVD players, such as the Sub Title, Return, Repeat, Angle, Enter and navigation keys, we will not go into detail about these keys. 

Upon loading a DVD Video disc, the player took around 30 seconds before anything appeared on-screen.  During playback, the DVD player gives the ability to jump to a given point of time, title and chapter as shown below:

While this player features a zoom key, it does not seem to be possible to navigate about the screen while zoomed in.  The arrow keys have no effect and the manual does not mention anything about zooming either other than where the zoom key is located.  On the other hand, it is nice to see the DVD player’s upscaling capability while zoomed in section, unlike most other DVD players that show a jagged image while zoomed in.  For example, here is a screenshot of the ending credits of a movie:

The following is the above screenshot, but zoomed in at the maximum zoom:

Finally, the ‘Info’ button displays the current chapter, title, angle and point of time, which can be useful to write this down to return to later, such as using the ‘Search’ feature mentioned above:

Video CD

To start with, this DVD player seems to be very quick at recognising and beginning playback of a video CD with our CD-RW of test videos taking just 8 seconds from the time we press the eject button to load the tray to the time the first track starts playing. 

On the other hand, unlike most DVD players we have come across, it took us a while to figure out how to work out how to control the playback of a Video CD.  For example, to our surprise we pressed the ‘Next Track’ button, the DVD player just skips ahead 24 seconds and pressing the repeat key or any digits gives ‘Invalid’.  For some reason, we need to press the ‘Return’ key before the controls are activated.  Finally, while we are unsure if this may be a fault with Nero 7’s Video CD encoder, which we used to create the test disc, each time we change track, the player’s counter skips quickly to about 20 seconds, even though the video actually displays from the start of the track.

After we press the ‘Return’ key to enable the controls, the digit keys take us directly to the track number, such as ‘4’ for track 4, ‘1’ + ‘2’ for track 12 and so on.  Like DVD playback, the ‘Search’ button allows us to jump directly to a track number and time position.  Unfortunately when we tried using this feature to jump to a given time, it would jump to a different part of the disc and interestingly when we tried jumping to Track 2, time 0:50, it jumped about 20 seconds ahead.  In a few cases, we also had garbage values appear on the display, although most of the digits returned back to normal by the time we took the photos:

The repeat options that are available are “Repeat Track”, “Repeat Disc” and “Repeat Cleared”.  Like playing an audio CD, the ‘Audio’ button selects between mono left, mono right and stereo.  Finally, the ‘Info’ button displays the current track position and repeat status, although as the track position matches the player’s front display, this is also about 20 seconds ahead, at least with our test video CD disc.

Super Video CD

Like Video CD, the player is fairly quick to recognise and begin playing the disc, with it taking just 9 seconds from the time we pressed the eject key to load the disc until the video started playing. 

However, like the Video CD, we had to press the ‘Return’ key before we could make use of some of the navigation keys.  In this case, before we pressed the ‘Return’ key, pressing the ‘Next Track’ button would jump ahead by around 4 to 5 seconds on our test SVCD disc, which we also created using Nero 7.  However, unlike the Video CD, the counter started from zero as each track started and jumping to a point of time worked as it should.

Besides proper track timing info from our test SVCD disc, all the other controls function the same as with the Video CD from our testing.

Playing photos

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When it comes to viewing photos, this player shows a significant improvement over the Helios HVD upscaling players we have reviewed, particularly with the time it takes to load up an image and its zoom capability.  We will perform loading time tests later in this review.

Interestingly, when we play a folder of photos from within NeoLink, the player displays the following to start with the following as slide 1.

From the NeoLink server, it takes about 15 seconds from the time we press play until the first photo begins to show, including the time showing the above image.  As the above image is shown as slide one, each photo is one value ahead of the picture numbers in the browser when we play the folder from the NeoLink server.  The player fades each photo in and out as it displays them, spending around 10 seconds per photo including the fading and loading time on our 6 Megapixel images.  Apart from the ability to select between straight through or shuffle on the NeoLink folder view menu, it is not possible to change the repeat setting.

From another media source such as a USB drive or a data disc, if we play the folder, each photo is immediately displayed one after another without any fading in-between, along with the file title and current slide number:

During playback (apart from playing from the NeoLink server), it is possible to change the repeat mode to either “Repeat One”, “Repeat All”, “Random”, “Repeat Random” and “Repeat Off” by pressing the ‘Refresh’ button, like with playing a folder of audio or video files.  We are not fully sure why there is a “Repeat One” option.  At first we thought this would basically act as a pause without displaying “Pause” on screen, but instead it repetitively loads the same picture over & over again and even showing that it is loading it each time.  To keep the same photo shown continuously, the pause button is adequate, since the writing clears off the screen after a couple of seconds.

To begin zooming, we first need to press the ‘Zoom’ key.  The player displays ‘Pause – Zoom On’ and it is now possible to zoom in and out using the ‘OK’ and arrow buttons.  After we enable zoom, we can zoom in and out using the left/down and right/up arrow keys respectively and alternate between zoom and pan by pressing the ‘OK’ button.  Unfortunately, like the majority of DVD players we have encountered including Helios Labs’ HVD2085 series, if the resolution is too high, such as from our 6 Megapixel images, the zoom button simply interpolates what is already on screen rather than viewing more detail from the source file of the photo, but if the resolution is low enough, the player will show more detail while zooming in.  For example, here is a 6 Megapixel digital photo before zooming in:

Here is the same photograph zoomed in:

Now, here is the same photo zoomed in after we have rescaled the photo to a lower resolution of 1600x1200:

The ‘Info’ button displays info about the currently displayed image, such as the file format, resolution, photo number and repeat mode.  Unfortunately, it does not display the file name or title when showing photographs over NeoLink:

Finally, while the player tries to show the photo slide number on its front display, unfortunately it only shows the first digit after the 9^th photo.  Unlike playing music or video, it is not possible to alternate between different displays modes either.  For example, the following photo shows the screen when we show photo number 640 in a large folder:

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