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

Page 7: Video Player

Finally, we’re up to the Video Player – once again, the basic navigation interface is folders and files, just like the other two player modes. However, the Video Player may be the top selling point of the On3, given its fairly widespread video format support: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (camcorders), DivX/XviD (internet, archived DVDs), RMP4, MOV, and AVI (which is more a file format than a video format). I think MPEG-4 and DivX support alone could sell a LOT of On3’s, if that’s a core advertising point – there still aren’t that many consumer electronics devices out there right now that can just take and play MPEG-4/DivX files. Well, except for certain DVD players, but those require burning a CD/DVD, whereas with the On3 you just copy the file up to the networked drive and you are ready to go.

If you’ve been paying attention, you could correctly assume that the Pause and Play buttons work as expected, the Page Up/Down buttons control the master volume, and the Setup button pops up a dialog with details on the current video file. And yes, the Mute button mutes the audio.

Video scale control is provided by repeated presses of the Zoom button, and allows the user to pick Actual Size, Fit to Screen, and Full Screen resizing of the video being played. While home theater enthusiasts might want more, I think this is a perfect system for the average consumer, and puts it into terms anyone should be able to quickly grasp. Here, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Actual Size – shows the video a pixel-matched screen size.

Fit to Screen – will uniformly stretch the image until the sides touch the screen edge.

Full Screen – will scale the image, not maintaining aspect ratio, to fill the screen corner-to-corner.

Hitting the Fwd/Rew buttons during playback initiates fast-forward/rewind modes, with each step increasing the rate by one. ‘One’ is too much in this case, as that means the playback rate is immediately 2x, 3x, or 4x, which can be really fast jumps! It’s a shame that there isn’t more granular control over fast-fwd/rewind, but then again I’ve used players that didn’t give even this level of control, and certainly not this level of speed (useful for big movies!). Pressing the left/right arrow buttons pops up an interactive ‘Go to %’ indicator, allowing you to quickly choose a percent offset in the file to jump to.

The first use of the Fwd/Rew/arrow buttons causes a pre-scanning/indexing of the entire video file – it doesn’t take too long, and enables the Fwd/Rew and Go To % features to work really quickly. The left/right arrows allow you to go to a particular percent-offset in the file, for a little more precise/fast jumping around a large video file.

I’m not sure why, but for me the Slow button didn’t seem to work. Maybe I was just in the wrong mode when I tried it – maybe I was paused or something, but I thought I tried at different times. From the docs, it should enter 2x/4x/8x/16x slow motion playback, which would be cool. Even simpler, and what many video players implement (i.e., most DVD players), is a frame-advance when you press the slow-forward button while in pause mode – that’d be a good thing to implement as an additional approach to slow-motion. Again, I could have missed something, or if it is a bug it should be a simple fix in the next firmware upgrade.

I did have one or two files in particular where the video playback de-synced from the audio. Since most of my tests (a random selection of SD/HD television shows and movies) jumped between formats, if there was a widespread issue, I’d have noticed it – that’s not the case. The worst file was XviD encoded, but I had another half-dozen XviDs that were fine, as were all the DivX and MPEG-1/2 files I tested. More than likely, this is due to some peculiarity of encoding/transcoding of the particular file, but it could be that XviD has some quirks in the playback code that need tweaking. Luckily, I played a ton of files without issues, and since the On3 is firmware-upgradeable, if there is a small percentage issue with certain formats in combination at certain playback sizes/levels, it can be fixed and distributed to consumers for free.

I should also note that the ‘clicks’ on the Analog stereo outputs occurred during video playback as well – not surprising at all, given the decoding software and hardware is shared – but still no problems with Digital audio outs.