Customer Reviews

Mvix Ultio UPnP Media Player

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just received the Ultio today and I am utterly blown away.

Firstly, I must note that the packaging is extraordinary; I'm going to hang onto it just going on looks alone, not including the fact it houses the HDMI cable.

I foolishly bought the product without a hard drive (and ended paying $$$ more at other store) but was able to install it without trouble in roughly 30 seconds.

The whole interface is easy to use and videos play without a hitch. I've recommended this product to everyone who is interested and will hopefully expand the march to end physical media.

For the $$ - this is the best media player out there. Plays MKV, RMVB, RM, ISO, M2TS and is networkable. What else can you ask for?

Since the new update on PlayON was released - this player has been working flawlessly. Hulu streams work reliably and so does streaming from my NAS media share.

I also bought the wireless-G adapter. It works well.

... and above all the embedded torrent client is the best kept secret of this little device.

Again, job well done.

This is a great player! I own it since end of summer 2009 and I am mostly pleased with it.

What I like:

*Price (at the time of writing this review).

*Exceptional HD video, great audio.

*Plays everything I throw at it.

*Unlike its predecessor, it does not freeze while moving fast forward or reverse.

*Plays files consecutively in a directory even if they are completely dissimilar.

*Supports internal SATA hard drives. Most cheaper alternatives don't. This translates to less cable clutter in my living room and my wife loves it.

*Great ergonomics and functionality - The remote control is well thought out.

*Connects to a USB DVD player. This way I can still play DVD files and share one video port on my Hitachi TV.

*Sturdy metal casing.

*Unlike other reviewers, I like the simplicity and the looks of the UI.

What I hate:

*MVIX has not improved the output quality when displaying photos. It seems that photos are displayed in standard definition as opposed to high definition (1080p) mode. So, despite the photos displaying fairly well, the unit does not take full advantage of its HD capabilities when doing so.

*The internal hard-drive as well as any other attached USB devices are available only after about half a minute from the time the unit was powered on.

*On my Hitachi flat screen TV, the on/off button on the remote needs to sometimes click twice when playing to shut down the unit. There seems to be no pattern regarding the On/Off switch behavior. If you have the same problem and figure it out, I would like to share the solution with you. Moreover, when the unit is connected to a PC using the USB cable, the On/Off switch does not function at all. On such occasions, I shut down the unit by plugging off the power cable.

*Though the internal hard drive fits nicely in the enclosure provided, there seems to be no apparent way to secure it inside the unit, making it a problem when traveling.

*There seems no apparent way to prevent accidental erasures of files when operating the remote. As a precaution, the unit should prevent a file delete if the file's attribute is set to read-only or through a password set to unlock the remote for file operations during the duration of the session.

*There seems to be no set delay when pausing to play the next file. Seems that the delay is currently set to about a second and this pauses a problem when you want to play songs continuously without any delay in between. Yes I know, stitch them all together in a big file blah-blah-blah but this is NOT an elegant solution.

*There is no search or quick find functionality and that makes locating files cumbersome. I have many media files all properly labeled with something meaningful. I also try to maintain meaningful directory structures for quick retrieval. But that's me. How about if I give the remote to someone else and let them locate the file. Forget it! Every time I do that I have to improvise.

*Unlike its predecessor the MX-780HD, wireless TCP connection on the MX-800HD is optional. After all, seems like the price got cheaper for a reason!

Despite the above nuisances this unit plays everything and does it really good! I would recommend this unit as an overall home media player.

had no idea what this thing was till my cousin told me about it and pretty much i got it as a Xmas gift in '09 i think (seems like i had it forever) and along with the western digital 1.5tb hd i bought for it this has been the best Christmas present ever if you don't own one yet you need to buy one asap!

I have had this device for almost a year, it has been a love hate relationship. I purchased this device because I have had good experiences with MVIX media players in the past and wanted to be able to watch numerous file formats. I have found very few files that won't work on this device and when it works it is fantastic!

However...

It often does not recognize the installed hard drive, will at times give an I/O Error for files (even though I have watched them several times already), and over time these difficulties have gotten worse and made the device useless.

So I contacted customer service. They had no suggestions other to send it in, so I paid the shipping and sent it to them. According to them there is nothing wrong and will be shipping it back. That is once they get the address right! They were going to ship it to the wrong address and I called in the nick of time to save it. That said I still don't have it back yet.

I will never buy from them again.

Ultio (no idea what it means) has been the centerpiece of our living room for over 20 days now and it already has the wifeys approval stamp on it.

Excellent Picture Quality. Versatile Features and Format Support. Remarkable Networking Capabilities.

Comes in a ready to use box. Even included is a HDMI cable (not sure why they bother to include the RWY composite set anyways?).

1.5TB of HDD space - all jam packed with HD movies and TV shows. Easy to use Navigation System. Near 100% playback Reliability.

Small footprint, responsive and low power consumption.

Did I say - I LIKE this unit?

I am fond of capturing our family's events with my new found love - the flipHD camcorder. I used to burn them in DVD for me to watch these treasured moments with my Plasma. But now all I need to do is transfer my media files in the internal HDD of my Mvix Ultio and start enjoying HD videos on a "real" screen. What a great pleasure to get away from those expensive DVDs. If you're wondering if Ultio can play .mts files, well IT REALLY DOES! and the picture quality is superior to all. One of the best purchases in the last six months.

The BT works a charm. Havent got round to dealing with much else on it but so far almost everything i have thrown at it has played just fine.

Note for the wise: If using HD videos, get the 1.5TB HDD - it fills up quite fast

I have purchased and used many Mvix products before... and without a doubt this one comes out far ahead of others. I got this about a month back, placed a 1.5 TB HDD inside and followed the basic instructions to format the drive and transfer files. The file formats supported by this player are a bit overwhelming: this device will playback almost any media file. It plays almost any format that I throw at it to the point that if it won't play on the Ultio then I throw the file away. One downside I found the user manual did not do justice to the extent of features of this player. Well... but if you are the one who reads a user manual - then this is not for you anyways.

I have about 1.3TB of music and video all stored on Ultio. Playback is flawless. Ability to download videos is embedded in the player software - making me even more lazy.

So far I had one interaction with their tech. support. They were swift and concise. Opened a support ticket at 1:15pm, received a reply back within 15 minutes. Problem solved.

I also bought the wireless-G adapter from Mvix directly. It is a rather large adapter and it can block other USB ports. Mvix knows this and included a short USB extension cable to prevent this obese beast from hogging all the space on your Ultio's backend. Enough said.

All in all, I am quite pleased with Ultio and also with Mvix as a company. I would strongly recommend this to whoever is looking for convenient (an inexpensive) alternatives to playing any media files on their entertainment system or for archiving a movie collection on a live drive.

i got the 1.5T mvix ultio... it plays pretty much anything you put on it, a big plus! but if you have lots of movies, have fun searching through them all.. there is an alphabetizing bug, 0-9 then a-z then A-Z... treats lowercase and upper case as different letters... it scrolls like 8 titles at a time.. very ugly UI, looks like an old dos command prompt.. (does have a movie preview to the right. .which is nice)... i really wish there was a way to review the film, see ratings, both star rating and parental guidance ratings... the drive is VERY noisy... there is samba support by default, you have to install the ad-ins (free)... but from there you are on your own.. anyone on the network can then see, edit, delete any files they want (no user/pass control) if that doesn't matter to you, then great, disregard that... for me it does, we have 14 plus computers on our network.. and i don't want them all accessing the utlio, but i wan access to it.. so they said i have to manually create mount points via telnet.. cumbersome and annoying (that way they don't have to do anything... and we are stuck trying to get it working right..)

i have to click 8 buttons to get to the movie section... there should be a button on the remote dedicated to MOVIES, PICTURES, MUSIC etc... but no.. you have to navigate into each section manually every time.. it does play movies fine though.. nice picture/sound, big hard disk.. and included HDMI cable is a plus!

pj

This box does most of what it claims. It can play most audio and video standards. It handles High Def reasonably well. It has a nice set of connections out the back. It works on a home network (see issues below), with an internal HD or by plugging in a USB HD, Flash Drive or DVD ROM.

Everything I've tried works except that Samba/Torrent support isn't embedded as stated in the description. In fact, you must download and zip the files from the [...] website and install them on the box to get Samba (I don't care about Torrent support) to work. For the non-Linux savvy, "Samba" means Windows networking. Once Samba was installed, I could interact with shared drives on my home computers and my home computers could interact with the Mvix box (named "Venus). One odd thing is there is no UI for changing the "computer" name from "Venus" to something else. Hopefully a future firmware version will fix this.

The Pros:

1) It does what it claims after downloading and installing additional software.

2) It's small and has plenty of options for connecting it to your TV or AV Receiver.

3) I'm happy with the sound and video quality.

4) It comes with and HDMI cable!

5) The price is reasonable.

The Cons:

1) The remote has tiny, hard to see buttons in a very non-standard layout. Someone in their 20s who's never used a good remote must have designed this.

2) Be very careful when opening the box. Upon arrival there is only one screw holding the parts together. Once removed, the pieces want to fall apart. Be careful to avoid dropping the pieces (I almost did).

3) I'm not wild about the UI. It uses file system based navigation. After using the Tivo and iPod UI's, I find UI's, like this one, to be cluttered and a pain to navigate. It would have been nice to have the top-level interface have an option of searching for material and placing it under Movies/Music/Videos/Photo and so on. Years ago Turtle Beach had a device called an Audiotron that did just that (for music).

4) The manual's printing is microscopic. It's very incomplete (an exploded view of the device would be nice and it barely touches on many topics). There's just enough info to get started.

This produce is an example of minimal, uninspired, feature oriented design. All I can say is that the features it presents work well enough for me. So I'm keeping it.

I received mine as defective from a pre-order in July (no video) and after waiting a month to repair, I got the unit back. I had video this time but the unit did not function. I would only see USB drives from time to time and the hard drive formatted once but was never seen by the unit again. After a month of tinkering with this and that at the direction of support, I finally lost patience and returned it hoping that I would get it back fixed. A month later, I got a note that they did not receive an RMA form (my fault for not reading the fine print). I questioned why it took a month to get that reply and they told me that they wait for the customer to contact them! I demanded a refund but they countered that the unit was beyond the 30 day refund policy. Never mind that they were repairing it for over the first 30 days! Lesson learned. My strong advice is to purchase another brand but if you really want an Ulto, you will find mine on eBay when they return it to me again. I finally broke down and filled out the form and hopefully it will return fixed this time.