AVerMedia AVerLife HD Studio
MRP: Rs 7500
Street price: Rs 6500 (eBay.in); Rs 5500 (CompareIndia.in.com)

High Definition televisions are fast becoming ubiquitous, but watching standard definition cable TV on such TV sets does not do justice to the features they provide. HD media players help realise the full potentials of HDTVs as they allow you to see the details such a TV is capable of displaying. There are many HD media players in the market today, some come plain vanilla, while others come with additional features such as internet connectivity. AVerMedia has been in the field of TV tuners since a very long time, and this company now also has HD media players on offer. The AVerLife HD Studio media player we received for review is capable of playing 1080p movies from any USB storage device connected to one of its two USB ports. Being an entry-level media player, wireless connectivity has been omitted. Additionally, it comes with wired internet connectivity. Let us take a look at how well it fared in our test.

Bundle
* AVerMedia AVerLife HD Studio
* Remote control
* AV cable
* Power adapter
* Quick Start Guide

AVerMedia should have provided an HDMI cable with this media player as is usually done by many other vendors.

Remote control
We must note here that barring the power button, there is no control button present on the device itself, but you can use the full-function remote control to control every possible aspect of the player. The buttons on the remote control are neatly laid out and spaced with proper labels in place to make it easy for anyone to use. The size of the remote control is also perfect for a device of this type. You can cycle the aspect ratio, resolution, and audio (useful for multiple audio files) using dedicated buttons for the same. The Goto button lets you navigate to a designated time position in a media. There are also dedicated buttons to access Flash media (Flash) and file manager (One-key). The 12 keys of the remote control assume alpha-numeric functions as soon as you start using the internet functionality.

Design And Features
The AVerMedia AVerLife HD Studio media player is a nice looking rectangular light grey polymer box with rounded sides and a sturdy build. The design resembles a box with a lid that can be lifted open, although you cannot open anything in this player. The top is covered with a sheet of aluminium with brushed metal finish, which is resistant to fingerprints and dust. Its dimensions are 12 cm wide, 10 cm breadth, and 3 cm thick. It has ventilation perforations at the bottom and on the left side. Four flat rubber legs at the bottom help it hold its ground. In addition to a power button on the left, there is a green power LED indicator on the right in addition to the IR receiver window.

The device is capable of reading from USB flash drives and hard drives with multiple file systems (even with multiple partitions), and also memory cards. NTFS file system is supported, so media file size limitation is not an issue. You can connect it to a standard analogue television using the AV cable, or hook it up to your HDTV using an HDMI cable. An SPDIF output can be used to connect to compatible audio systems. One USB port is present at the back in addition to an Ethernet port for wired network connectivity.

 

One USB port is located on the left of the device. As mentioned earlier, a ventilation grill is present here.

 

A lone memory card reader is present on the right of the device, capable of reading MS, SD, and MMC cards. The casing has also got a covered slot, which appears similar in size to a CF memory card reader. The company could have plans to use this casing in a future media player supporting this professional memory card format.

 

Performance
On powering on the player, it takes just about 5 seconds to get into the ready state. The interface consists of horizontal scrolling icons. It is very smooth and easy to use and looks polished. There are icons for Movie, Photo, Music, Text (to read eBooks in TXT format), Flash (for playing SWF format), Network (to access internet features), File (to use the inbuilt file manager for all types of files), and Setting.

Movie, Photo, Music, and Text icons can be used to explore the contents of connected USB storage devices filtered to show only specific media types. File icon can be used to view all types of files at the same time. The vertical scrolling file interface is similar to that of Windows Explorer with files and folders listing. Highlighted files can be viewed in a thumbnail with live preview, though this setting is not enabled by default. When more than one USB storage device is connected, the names of the devices are shown and you can choose the one you want to explore. Internet features are limited to Flickr, Picasa, and internet radio. If there would have been support for Skype and YouTube, it would have practically turned a plain vanilla HDTV into a Smart TV. We think that AVerMedia can add these features via a future firmware update. These features can be accessed only after you configure the network settings of the device.

The Setting section lets you adjust different settings for the player. The Display setting lets you choose the output resolution and the aspect ratio, but there is no option to configure options such as noise reduction and 24 Hz film mode. Photo, Movie, and Music settings allow you to file listing options including thumbnail, sorting order, etc. There is also an option to upgrade the firmware of the device over the internet or via USB storage media.
 
The playback of media files was smooth without any hiccups regardless of the resolution of the media file. There wasn't a single file format we tried, that the player could not handle. The player can even handle ISO files for DVDs and Blu-rays. The output image quality is as good as the source you provide. Noise filtering seems to be very low or absent because noise source seems to go to the TV unaltered and you have to depend on the noise filtering features of the TV (if it has any). Adjustments for contrast, brightness, etc, are not available in the player, so you have to again depend on your TVs settings to adjust them. SD videos are scaled up well to Full HD displays. HD videos appear better than satellite television on old CRT TVs.

Some portions of the left and right ends of the video are invariably lost on a 16:10 display, while such a problem was not observed when the device was connected to a 16:9 display. The subtitle font shows poor readability at the default white setting and you cannot change the font type. Increasing the size and colour could help, but then the fonts appear too large and distracting. One more issue encountered during playback was that the some of the subtitles are skipped, thus while you may view the subtitle for one dialogue, the same for the next dialogue will not be visible, skipping instead to the next dialogue. This may even happen within a single dialogue, thus making the script appear disjointed.

 

The player supports 7.1-channel Dolby Digital and DTS Audio, so the audio quality is good too. However, there are no audio adjustments such as bass and treble. As mentioned earlier, you can choose the audio track from a video file when it contains more than one, by using the Audio button on the remote control.

We were interested in finding out the power consumed by this device, so we connected it to a Kill-A-Watt meter. With the soft power switched off, the power consumption showed as 0 W, which means that it is less than 0.5 W. When switched on, the power consumption was found to be constant at around 5 W, and it goes to a maximum of 7 W while playing 1080p movies, which is quite low. This is an astoundingly low figure, and more so when you compare it with the power consumption figures achieved while playing the same files using a PC. For comparison's sake, a PC can consume an average of 100 W while playing 1080p HD videos and around 85 W for DVD quality videos. The PC we used, contained an AMD Phenom II X2 550 with Galaxy GeForce 460GTX GC Edition and a single hard drive spinning at 7,200 RPM.

Verdict
The AVerMedia AVerLife HD Studio media player is very good when it comes to the features it provides and the media playback performance is almost flawless even at 1080p with excellent SD upscaling. Almost every popular media format is supported in addition to ISO images of DVDs and Blu-rays. The user interface is fast and very easy to use. Network capability allows you to use the internet applications of Picasa, Flickr, and internet radio. The power consumption is also considerably low as is expected of such media players. However, it does come with certain flaws such as poor noise filtering, poor display and skipping of subtitles. The player comes with internet features, but falls short of a few features such as Skype and YouTube, which would have turned a plain HDTV into a Smart TV. These issues can be solved via a firmware upgrade, but until then, you have to live with them. The AVerLife HD Studio is available for an MRP of Rs 7500, but you can get it online for Rs 6500 as mentioned at the start of the review. Local dealers sell it for even less at around Rs 5500. It is covered by a 1-year warranty.

Features: 4/5
Performance: 3/5
Value For Money: 3.5/5
MoJo: 3.5/5

Overall Rating: 3.5

TAGS: Media Players, AVerMedia, Jayesh