It’s really barely a draft

MVix Ultio part 2 – It’s great, but not quite as advertised… (English)

July 16th, 2009 Posted in gadgets, service

The short answer is that it works great, but the slightly longer answer is that not everything works as advertised and the unit is not for everyone (the image above might give a “subtle” clue to what doesn’t work…).

First of all, mad props to my newfound friends at Thinkgeek.com. They delivered the box in just 2 days (t-w-o!!!!) from US to Denmark. Incredibly fast I have to say! It doesn’t get more efficient than that. And the fact that the package didn’t get held up in customs (with would have added additional charges) only makes it that much better!.

The MVix Ultio box itself  seems a little flimsily built. It’s basically a motherboard with a casing. When I took the motherboard out of the enclosure I felt like I could easily break/bend/ruin something on it. The internal hard drive was, however, fairly easy to install and setup the – not for non-geeks, but easily as easy as installing a hard drive on a regular computer and the user manual instructions  on who to format and setup the drive on the unit were quite good.

Now the review to follow gets a little ugly at the end, so please read it all and stop while I barf gall over the post, because the bottom line is that the MVix Ultio is pretty good overall, but it’s clear from using it that it was made by engineers who didn’t come form Apple. Judging from the Ultio’s operation and features, they bear more resemblance to Microsoft mentality (more features is better. A dazzling user experience is notas primary a concern as Apple). It could also be the unit is mainly targeted at enthusiasts who can live without the sazz and final touches (and maybe I don’t quite fall into that category anymore?!). Read on and I will epxlain in detail.

The good: What works great

Luckily the main feature of the MVix Ultio work great – watching videos.
The remote, box and video, including subtitles, interacts, responds, displays and plays beautifully (when all setup correctly and the movie has started). You gotta give it that. Very nice! I can’t stress this enough how important this is. That the remote starts, increase/decrease volume, shows/hides subtitles instantly you don’t have to point the remote directly at the MVix Ultio, is a real real pleasure. It’s something you usually take for granted, but not all implementations are as good as this one! the operation and speed of shifting through menus etc. is in sharp contrast to the crappy performance of my previous YouSee cable PVR (a samsung unit) that I wrote about a while back

MVix is very silent. It gets relatively warm to the touch when operating, yes, but since I’m not gonna be touching it while watching movies on it, what do I care?! There is no active cooling in the unit either, but if it doesn’t need it, hooray! Let’s hope the crafty guys at MVix got good grades in math and physics so their calculations on head emissions are correct. So far the unit has completed its first Le Mans (24 hours straight) with no hickups (yes, I forgot to turn it off one night…).

Also great is that it’s been able to handle every codec I have thrown at it – even a video I couldn’t get to work on my PC! That we like long time!! The Ultio has another really cool feature in that it it can play ISO images. This is cool as I can make ISO images of all my DVDs and have the Ultio run them, including the menu structure and all the other features. Of course to complete my collection on the Ultio that I would have to seriously upgrade the storage capacity in the unit – currently I have a 200GB drive in the Ultio, but I could switch that to a larger drive. I saw that 1.5TB  (1.500GB)  drives can be acquired for as little as $130 some places at time of writing and that price is only going one way.

Finally, least but certainly not least. The customer service of MVixUSA has, throughout my dealings with them been absolutely fabulous. Open, honest and very responsive are three words that are very saying about my experiences with the company so far. So a big thanks and mad love should also go out/be sent to Marcus Sattler, Mark H., Cherize and Mark (could be the same Mark, but with the amount of answers he has provided I don’t mind mentioning him twice). If for nothing else I definitely give a “would buy again, A+++” rating with MVixUSA as a company (and the thinkgeek.com ordering experience didn’t hurt either). Great committed staff who seem so to want to help. Now if only they would also fix what is about to come in the rest of this post I wouldn’t be able to complain.

The bad: Could be better and lead to a better experience

MVix is advertising the possibility of “Managing all file operations  via the remote”, but I find this feature not worth mentioning. Yes it can be done, but you have to be a very patient person to do it. Copying large amounts of data from a USB stick to the HDD is very cumbersome and it is much more convenient to just take the unit, wack in a USB cable and connect it to a computer and transfer from there. This especially, as the MVix Ultio  GUI is basically a graphically souped up  command line prompt. It works, but structuring all the data (creating folders, sub folders, etc.) on  MVix Ultio is apparently the job of the user, not the unit

The GUI (Graphical User Interface) brings back (fond) memories of Commodore C64 and the Death Knights of Krynn series in that the GUI is not very impressive. It is somewhat helped when setting the input/output to “HDMI Autodetect”, but it is still a very very basic GUI. Where’s the XBMC or Boxee like slick GUI that makes you want to just browse through the menu system instead of watching a movie? I mention the WD TV later in this post, be be rest assured its GUI is pretty much as basic the Ultio’s – maybe a little nicer.

Also something I find weird is how subtitles are handled. It’s not described anywhere either. Luckily it does work by having the subtitle file (I used a .srt file to test) in the same folder as the movie being watched and having the exact same name as the video file (just with a different extension, so .srt instead of .avi). A side note, get your subtitles at e.g. opensubtitles.org

A feature I would like to see when/if the GUI matures out of what it is today, is integration with e.g. imdb (or similar service) to pull down information such as title, dvd image and lots of metadata, synopsis, plot etc. It’s that kind of polish that isn’t there presently in the box.

I would also have liked that the unit could be wall mounted easily, or that a solution would be provided to drill it to the wall (like holes in the unit, screws and rawlplugs), which I still intend to do, but it would have been nicer

The ugly: What bugs me

Advertised as having USB wifi, when in fact is doesn’t at all currently. I’ve wasted $40 on MVix dongle which they are even telling me might not get to work (but they aren’t excluding it either). So I’m stuck having to either use a f***ing long ethernet cable accross my living room or move and setup my extra aiport express (my main router is an airport extreme)’ to get the ultio wired to something. Either option is not optimal because one would be incredibly ugly (cable) and the other would require me moving an airport express unit which would mean I could no longer have it hooked up to my Apple Hifi speakers, which again would stop me from being able to listen to music on good speakers. Rats!!!

The big “grrrr” is, however, really about the fact that I can’t use in its current form for downloading torrents (e.g. the quality TED talks) or stream video files stored on my NAS storage unit or from one of the many other computers I have in the house that are UPnP enabled. This is especially annoying as I did buy the Ultio over the WD TV due to those features (well, and the internal HD – which works and is awesome!)

What’s the verdict?

Well, I bought the unit insterad of the WD TV because of its extensive codec support (admittedly the WD TV offers pretty much the same support in that regard), it’s internal drive, it’s included bittorrent client, it’s support for UPnP devices/apps and (very importantly), because it advertised wifi support on the specifications page.

So right now I can conclude that the codec support was no lie (and is implemented nicely), internal drive is also a check. But the “dealbreakers” that made be buy the unit instead of the alternative I can’t use or test because wifi is NOT currently supported on the unit. So I can’t check how and if these services work and how well (e.g. can you setup the bittorrent client to use a specific port that I have open on the router or not? how well doe sthe UPnP service work?). Hopefully the firmware will be updated soon and unit is made compatible with my MVix wifi dongle (or MVix will send me a new one that works…).

So I’ll give it 3/5 stars for now and it will definitely get 4/5 when the wifi starts working. The question is of course whether the implementation when it works is good enough for the full 5/5 rating. If you don’t need the wifi, but are able to plugin the the MVix Ultio in to a wired connection I am sure it is already working wonderfully and deserves 4/5 stars easily.

I remain hesitantly hopeful my issue(s) will be resolved over the summer period.

You might also be interested in reading:

1. Xtreamer Media Player – a good replacement for MVix Ultio with a future (English)
2. Mvix Ultio: My new “Special Retirement payout (SP)” funded media center (English)
3. Mvix Ultio – part 3: I think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence
4. This just in: HideItMounts.com has world’s best customer service; allround good people
5. The Script – Breakeven song underscores I don’t listen to lyrics (English)