I chose this little box over the NBox and other comparable media players, mainly because it has a wider array of audio/video ports, and it pretty much splits the difference price-wise. I am using the HDMI port for my plasma screen, and the digital coaxial port for my receiver. I am beholden to Western Digital My Passport Essential USB drives, and I couldn't be happier with the results. The HD picture looks fantastic, and the booming 5.1 surround sound far exceeds what I could get out of my laptop. It browses reasonably fast through your files, folders, and sub-folders, and it offers continuous playback of your media. It played AVI, MPG, MP4, VOB, MKV, and pictures with no problems. The box is packed with composite cables and a short component video cable. It has two USB ports, and you can supposedly copy/paste/delete between the two, and apparently you can play a photo slideshow and music simultaneously, neither of which I have tried yet.However, it does have it's shortcomings. Like most remotes, this one is a little user un-friendly, and doesn't seem to work when you're more than 10 feet away. The manual is scrawny and somewhat disorganized, so read it carefully. It wouldn't cooperate with one of my drives for some reason, and it also wouldn't play any of my Flash videos, not that I ever save them anyway. I put a movie on pause for a few minutes; when I resumed play the audio became out of sync, and I had to cue backwards to align it again. Still, the pros far outweigh the cons--I doubt I'll burn a DVD ever again.
Some tips: if you hook this up and turn it on and get no picture, repeatedly push the "TV Out" button on your remote first, the menu should soon come up in sharp full-color form. I recommend powering down the unit using the on/off switch on the back, rather than using the remote. It's supposed to go into "standby", but it seems to me that it still uses too much power for being inactive, and I'm more comfortable shutting the player down completely before I remove the USB cable. If your movie file is encoded with AC3 audio and you're using a hi-fi, set the digital out to "RAW" so your receiver can decode the Dolby Digital/DTS soundtrack, otherwise you'll just get 2-channel stereo.
All in all, a remarkably versatile little gadget that should round out any home theater, whether you're running out of storage space for your DVDs and CDs, or if you want a convenient way to move your PC experience to the living room. I just hope it's as durable as it performs.
Buy Micca MPLAY-HD 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player For USB Drives and SD/SDHC (Realtek 1055) Now
Working exactly as described, have had NO trouble hooking it up, having it recognize and read my files from hard drive, and remote works also. VERY nice to have. However, now that I have had it for about a month, it keeps freezing and then when you try to turn it off, it won't and it won't play or move and so we have to pull the power out of the back and restart it that way, then sometimes it flickers when coming back on and you have to unplug it a second time. I am hoping this problem does not get worse, if it keeps it up at its current rate, it is livable, but if it gets any worse I may become upset. Bummer too, because I love the convenience and if I could afford it I would get one for every room and get rid of all movies and DVD's. :-)From the Product Description: "The MPLAY-HD makes finding and playing your media files quick and easy. Its media library feature is like Google for your videos and music, finding exactly what you want is just a quick search away even when you have thousands of files."Um... My 250 gig hard drive takes two hours to index. That's NOT "quick and easy".
I can imagine that this player would seem perfectly wonderful for anyone just starting out in life, with only a handful of media files. You know: a few dozen songs; the holiday photos; 3 movies. The interface would seem awesome. The 10-second delay while the machine indexed your couple of hundred files would be almost no worse than waiting for your DVD player to read a disc menu. But fast forward to the same person, 6 months later, with a few thousand songs, 150,000 images, and 5 movies, and this player is just an utterly frustrating kid's toy version of what it actually claims to be.
Prior to having indexed everything the player is useless*[but see footnote added after hearing from Micca on this] folders simply don't exist in the menu. Once the index file is in place you are good, unless you power down the player or remove the drive. If you do that you then have to wait for, or cancel, the "quick" re-scan, which takes about a third of the full time but actually doesn't seem to do any fresh indexing. I may be wrong about that. After waiting 40 minutes I usually have forgotten what it was I set out to do.
If you rename files or folders, the old files and folders are all that show up in the menu until the drive has been completely re-indexed, and trying to access them results in an error.
If you delete a folder, even using the player itself, the folder still shows on the menu until you perform a complete rescan, and trying to open it results in an error.
If you forget to delete the recycle bin on your hard drive, or, you know, you actually WANT your hard drive to have a recycle bin, all the recycled files show up as regular files on the scan. Deleted media files show up as all being in the recycle bin folder, under bizarre names, and are all presented first in a list of available files. But deleted folders appear in their original undeleted place in the directory structure, as though you hadn't deleted them after all. If you try to open one of these folders you get an error message.
If you simply add a few folders to your disk drive and plug it back in, the new files don't show up at all until you've done a complete rescan.
Did I say how long that takes? At best, the player can scan about 30 files a second. That sounds awesome until you do the math on how many files there are on your hard drive.
THAT is what makes this player absolutely useless to me.
The reason I bought this player is that I had the earlier version with the exact same name. It was a bit flaky at times if it couldn't read a file it locked up. If you tried to hurry it, it locked up. If it was in a bad mood, it locked up. Curing the problem took 10 seconds: unplug and reboot. It had no frills It couldn't do random play, which was frustrating, but then (unbelievably) neither can the new one, and it had a character maximum for files in a folder: if a folder contained 14,000 files you pretty much had to name them "00001" through "14000" to get them in under the character limit, or the player locked up. But, well, I can't think of anything else I wanted from it that it couldn't do. It was a four star machine and what in particular it could do is take any size hard drive and allow me to navigate the hard drive's directory to find a folder of items to play so that within moments of plugging the hard drive into the player, I could forget the player existed and just enjoy the show.
I figured it was so good that I wanted another one; that way I could play a slideshow on one, and music on the other, and not have to interrupt one whilst making changes to the other.
But instead of the player I was expecting, I received this piece of garbage.
Oh, and after having allowed the new player to scan my disc drive, Windows 7 then suggests the drive may be damaged, and asks to check it for errors. The problem persisted and I re-formatted the drive in order to start over from scratch. After that the drive worked perfectly, enabling me to port files back and forth from home to work without any error messages, until I again allowed the Micca player to scan it. The same thing happened to my backup disc drive.
One time after using my disc drive in the Micca player it became entirely unreadable by Windows 7, resulting in another format; another time after using my backup drive in the media player almost all the files on it appeared to have a different time stamp to the files they were copies of, which meant the backup program basically had to delete the entire disk, file by file, and rewrite everything. This took all evening. I have no evidence that the Micca player was in any way responsible for either of these events. I just mention them in case someone reading this had the same bizarre things happen to them.
During the week I spent struggling to find a way to get the player to work in a way that was useful to me, I encountered a number of other problems and quirks that I neglected to document properly. But, to be fair, the new player does have a few neat tricks I'd like to see implemented on a player that does its scanning on the fly. For example, clicking "play" on a folder allows the player to play everything in that folder, including nested folders. Unfortunately you can't jump in half way; it's all or nothing, unless you are prepared to press "forward" a few thousand times....
Oh. That reminds me:
The old player figured that if you pressed "forward" or "backward" during a slide show, and it responded by displaying the subsequent or previous image, then that ought to be sufficient feedback for you to know it was doing what you asked. That's the sensible way of things. The old player was clever like that. It also was pretty reliable about responding to such a request. The new player, on the other hand, doesn't think like that at all. When you press "forward" or "backward", and the device actually figures out what you wanted and responds to your request (often it just doesn't bother, or it waits 10 seconds to think about it), it then changes the image and throws up a huge arrow in the top right corner of the screen by way of confirming that it is indeed doing what you asked. This ridiculously blatant icon persists for a couple of seconds and is horribly distracting while it is on screen. A manually operated slideshow really tests your mettle. I gave up. It just bugged me too much. The entire player just bugged me too much.
So I replaced the new Micca player with the old player, took the two hard drives I'd used for the test, reformatted them and re-installed all their files, and I am now back to where I was a week ago with nothing to show for my wasted time and money other than this scathing review.
*Added August 15, 2011, and see additional notes in comments: The player works pretty well if you turn off the indexing, and instead of using the "Music" or "Photo" icons you use the "File" icon and then click OPTIONS to select "All Media". You can then navigate the regular file structure and go right to the folder where your stuff is. This information is somewhere in the manual. Way towards the back, I think. I certainly missed its importance when I read through the manual on first opening the box. I have thus altered my rating from one star to three stars. I still think the whole idea of scanning a drive for files in order to build a media library is horribly flawed.I just bought this digital player and it works great. The price was good and the quality is pretty solid. The player will not play back videos captured with my cell phone except for the audio portion. Also, the female end of the AC power conection on the player is a bit loose and doesn't keep the plug in place to well (so don't move it around after you have it hooked up or it will get disconected)!
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