Articles

TESTING METHODOLOGY - TEST RESULTS

   After thinking it over i have decided on performing the same exact tests for all the Media Players i review. This occurred right after some of you emailed me while on my previous position asking for a more reliable methodology when testing such players/recorders. To be honest this may complicate things but it should also save me quite a bit of time. So from now and on testing will be performed with the help of 4 specific MKV media files and several BDISO, MOV, RMVB and AVI ones, with bitrates of up to 35Mbps, something which as many of you know is not easy to come by. Of course the 4 specific MKV files are ones i ripped myself from 4 Blu-Ray titles i currently own in order to not only manage to hit the desired bitrate of up to 35Mbps but also use specific, high detailed scenes. My good old SONY 55A2000 (already 3+ years old but still my favorite) along with my latest Panasonic TX-P42S20 are the two screens i will be using for testing. In due time and when i finally see a 3D Screen that really makes me want to buy it i will also start using 3D material for testing but currently that is simply not possible and so i can't comment on 3D results. As for sound the audio/video amplifiers used with the two screens are the Yamaha RX-650 and the Yamaha RX-V463 coupled with 5.1 systems by TANNOY and Crystal Audio.

   The aios HD media center has been with us since early March so we had almost two full months to test it again and again. Now although during the first half the first firmware updates failed to resolve some of the issues we found (typos, freezing when external USB devices are connected due to media file scanning, Wi-Fi discovery not the best, sketchy support for 3TB drives) still Pivos did start to provide us with new firmware updates and so right now most of those issues have been resolved and the aios is finally what it should be from day one. The only issue that i have with the aios HD media center is the dark video output (compared to other RTD1185DD based units) and although you can fix it from the image settings menu still i don't know the reason behind that (could be a problem with our test sample). Finally it would be nice if Pivos shipped the aios HD media center with a Wi-Fi USB dongle for people who want to be 100% certain it will work as it should. I did use the aios with two Wi-Fi dongles, one from ACRyan and one from TRENDnet but i did experience issues with hidden/stored networks which were not completely resolved with any of the firmware updates released till this day.

     Bellow you will find 4 different screenshots from the 4 specific MKV media files i mentioned above featuring a bit rate between 20 and 35Mbps. The resolution has remained unchanged (however the files are compressed to JPEG to save space on the server) at 1920x1080.