Hardware Icy Box IB-MP309HW-B HD Media Player

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/05/28/icy-box-ib-mp309hw-b-hd-media-player-review/1

If you've got a library of HD content and are looking for an easy way to get it onto your HDTV then the latest Icy Box could be just what you're after. Boasting playback of even the beefiest 1080p files and with a list of supported codecs as long as an MP's expenses claim is this a genuine alternative to a full HTPC?

 

According to the screenshots that are posted in this article, it seems this is based on the same hardware on which the Popcorn Hour A-110 (http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinest...g&task=info&item_id=10&main_id=0&category_id=) is based...

The Popcorn Hour is a very nice box, but the interface is rather clumsy It does play everything I throw at it

 

do you mean that that codec is used frequently? or rarely? i am confused.

 

I personally was a little disappointed with my popcorn hour. I found that it crashed quite frequently especially when downloading torrents. I am not sure if it is a fault with my box or not but I can’t help feel that it is puny CPU that gets overwhelmed and then causes everything to freeze.

However I do have to agree with tnkflx, it plays everything I throw at it and it does it well.

 

This sounded interesting until I saw the price. For under £200 you can get an Acer Revo which gives you a fully featured PC able to use a nice free interface like Myth. It'll handle all the HD files easily and will give you a lot more flexibility.

The only plus for the Icy Box seems to be the already setup nature of it which is let down by the slow interface.

 

I am following the NMT devices closely. My current 6 year old HTPC build is getting a beating when playing 1080P content. Well it wants to play but its just to slow. Its had Asus SLI-32 deluxe with 2gb ram, athlon s939 x2 3400 and ATI pci-e card. (x1600?)

Any advise to extend the life of my HTPC. Maybe a better videocard that will playback 1080p or do i need to find a better processor also?

 

+1 the idea is good and i like the idea of a prebuilt interface with a remote. if its going to be slow and take forever to do anything i'll leave it thanks.

i can imagine being sat there with friends while they lambasted my home setup because they are made to look at an icybox logo for 20 seconds (i have very unforgiving friends)

 

Any chance of formatting this with a full-fledged Linux distro?

 

Cute. Too expensive. No real need.

 

Stick a video card capable of decoding video through dvxa into it. Have to make sure the software you use is capable however.

 

More thank likely, yes. For a given value of 'fully fledged'.

It looks like this device runs more or less the same OS used by the IB-4220B NAS box and there's a fairly large community of users who are into hacking, modding and generally repurposing their NAS boxen (eg. as embedded webservers). RaidSonic/IcyBox actually encourage these folks, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's info out there on beefing up/replacing the stock firmware etc. May be worth casting your eye over the RaidSonic website and forums to see what's what.

However, since it's running an ARM-based processor your choice of distro is going to be fairly limited unless you're prepared to roll your own (think there's still an ARM-friendly Debian set but that's about yer lot)

 

Hi all

Firstly thanks to bit-tech for reviewing the IB-MP309HW-B. Thanks for reading the review, some negative comments passed from you guys have noted, we can now use these comments and learn what more you would expect to see from the product. The chipset used is also expensive, when the product was put into production Raidsonic included as many features as possible which does make the product stand out.

Raidsonic has also paid for the licenses to use the various file formats etc featured on the MP309, many other media players do not have the licensing. as company Raidsonic is respected because of this.

I’ve operated one of these myself menu response time I feel is still comfortable, besides.. how long do you plan to sit in the menus for when you should be enjoying your full high definition movies or nodding your head along to some music

For anyone who plans to purchase or already owns one of these will be pleased to know that a firmware update is already available with a truck load of fixes and changes to improve the device. A full list can be found in our care forums by visiting this link...

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=1998622#post1998622

 

^^^^Always nice to see companies paying attention their customers. Bonus points to Raidsonic!

 

+1
excellent.

 

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ yeah we're beginning to see more of this, its always nice to hear the manufacturers opinions and explanations

 

Agreed, as long as it doesn't turn out the way it did with the crappy all-in-one water cooling solution by I-forgot-the-name-of-the-stupid-company where the rep just talked BS all the time.

 

can you ask them to put on hologram support, that would be cool!

 

good review, first one ive seen that tics most of my boxes. ive been thinking of something along these lines for a while now - was disappointed that the wi-fi is an add on though, but thought it would still be worth it until the "slight" issues with the os were highlighted.
im certainly in the market for something like this, purely as a network player - hopefully there will be an update on this to see if the os issues have been smoothed a bit?

 

Been looking for a box like this with such versatility for ages but seeing as the interface is sluggish and has long waits at certain times it's just a big no no. What a shame. It checks off all but UI...
I guess I'll have to wait just a little longer till someone gets it all right

 

haha that dude was clearly just given a page of marketing jargon and told to get posting! hopefully other companies will be more receptive and less PR driven (it was CoolIT btw)