Review: FIA : On3 Player - Digital Media Player and Library

Page 4: Plug-in & Tune-in

Once you’ve got the basic PC setup in place to move datafiles onto the unit, you’ll want to hook the On3 up for output. The back of the Guide foldout deals with connecting the On3 up to a TV/stereo for playback, and detailing the multitude of buttons on the remote control (okay, it doesn’t detail all the buttons, but denotes the major functions). Again, it gives reasonably simple steps, with pretty pictures for the home crowd. 

Once you’ve plugged in the audio and video outputs into your TV (and maybe home theater), you can hit the power button on the remote to turn on the ‘front end’ of the On3 (separately ‘active’ from the ‘back end’ networked hard-drive controller). Note however that the infrared reception of the On3 is extremely narrow, and thus the remote needs to be fairly dead-on to the On3 for a button press to register.

If your video connection isn’t the default, Composite, you need get your video mode set properly. This is pretty easy, as there’s actually a ‘TV Mode’ button on the remote. Just press it a few times, pausing on each press, until the video mode syncs up with your display properly (and matches what you were looking for). The On3 currently cycles through the following settings: Composite/S-Video NTSC, Component NTSC, Composite/S-Video PAL, Component PAL, HDTV 480p, HDTV 720p, HDTV 1080i, and for some strange reason also lists VGA 1024x768 (even though this model has no VGA connector).

Other notable buttons on the top of the remote include the main Power and Mute control buttons and a full set of numeric buttons for menu selection (with alphabet-overlays, a caps/numlock button, and backspace button, all together allowing full text input if needed). Next down is the TV Mode button and it’s counterpart the Audio Mode button (for selecting mono channels versus stereo), the Setup button (pops up an information dialog while viewing media), the Refresh button (which is really a Rotate button, for rotating images), and the Page Up/Down buttons (used for page navigation in interface screens, or volume control during media playback). Finally, at the center of the remote are the Tab and Frame buttons (which are for navigating screens, but the Frame button is currently unused), the directional arrows (the primary cursor controls to navigate the interface), and finally the Enter button (to select the current interface item).

On the bottom part of the remote are more specialized control buttons. Along the left edge are the Home button (returns you to the main menu), the Login button (returns you to the POP Director main login screen, which you should rarely ever need to do), and the URL button (for jumping to a webpage, but currently unused). Along the bottom are the color-coded Video (red), Music (green), and Photo (yellow) buttons – the colors match the main menu interface – which will take you immediately to the respective mode main menu, plus an extra blue button which is unused. Note that these mode-jump buttons only work if you aren’t currently playing/viewing media. There’s a full set of standard media-playing buttons, including Play, Next, Prev, Fwd, Rew, and Stop, each doing pretty much what you’d assume. The last buttons are Repeat (toggles repeat-play on/off), Zoom (cycles through video-scale modes in video playback, and toggles on/off zooming during photo viewing), and Slow (in video, supposed to enter slow-motion playback, though I never got it to work).

Even after the basic video mode is set, you can go back and change it at any time by hitting the button again – or, alternately, from the POP Director on-screen options panel. The POP Director options panel also allows you to change the settings for the default Audio stream (analog Stereo or digital AC3 5.1), the current Video Zoom (discussed later), the system language, and the time until the screen saver kicks in. Note that options like the hard disk sleep time is not set from the On3 directly, just the options relevant to the ‘front end’ of the On3’s media player ’side’ of functions.

Of course, when you have the video correct, you should see the On3 main menu displayed, showing Video, Music, and Photo as your media options. On my particular unit, the On3 defaulted to the POP Director main login screen, rather than the ‘media playback’ main menu – requiring an extra button-press on the remote to go to the main menu. Just a minor issue, but could cause a lot of tech support calls if it happens in the wild.  I would have assumed a unit would ‘try’ to start up on the main menu rather than the login screen by default.