Black Boxes: Prismiq MediaPlayer

by Charles Fulton
Summer/Fall 2003

Company: Prismiq
Contact: (866) PRISMIQ
Web: www.prismiq.com
Price: $250

Looking for a way to browse the Web and view media from your favorite recliner on the cheap? Prismiq's MediaPlayer might be right up your alley. At $250 (with a free IR keyboard, for a limited time), it's quite a steal on paper.

Out of the box, the Prismiq MediaPlayer is a diminutive 9" x 1.5" x 5.25". Hookup is a snap: just connect it to your network via a 10/100 Ethernet cable or slip in an 802.11b PCMCIA Card for wireless access. Then, connect it to your AV system via the composite, S-video, stereo analog and coaxial digital outputs.

The Power of the Penguin
Plugging the AC adapter into a power outlet completes the hookup process. The unit immediately begins booting with a cute little sound (which happens to be the only sound the unit makes other than the media that it plays) and a colorful splash screen. The unit booted its Linux distribution relatively quickly. Based on the Debian distribution and built from the 2.4.17 kernel, the MediaPlayer doesn't have a hard drive and instead uses 64MB of solid-state memory. The brain of the unit is an NEC uPD61130 processor, which includes a built-in MPEG decoder.

To access the unit's various functions, just press the button on the top row of the keyboard (or in the top two rows of the remote control) that correspond to the function that you want to access: Home, Web, chat, movies, music or photos.

The Prismiq MediaPlayer uses a point-and-click interface, controlled by thumb pads on the remote control and keyboard, that behaves as you'd expect it to (more or less). We found the thumb pad on the remote control to be rather touchy. Interestingly, the page-up and page-down buttons on the keyboard didn't work for us, but the corresponding buttons on the remote worked just fine. The configuration screens look like they are based on the Linux X windowing system, which is the most common graphical user interface run on desktop Linux systems.

Well, it's the Web, but...
At this point, we pressed the Web key to surf the Net. The Web browser reminded us a bit of the Linux version of Mozilla. However, we quickly found ourselves hitting walls quickly, as the browser is not Java- or Flash-enabled. We also found that the MediaPlayer couldn't play Ogg Vorbis, QuickTime, Windows Media or Real files.

The chat features were quite good, with a built-in AIM-compatible chat client that even displayed which of the people in our buddy list were online at the time (we weren't able to see the inactive names in the buddy list, however).

Since the MediaPlayer does not have a hard drive to cache Web elements, the unit takes some time to render all but the simplest Web pages even after you have visited them once before. Although the unit was connected (via a Linksys 10/100 DSL/Cable router) to a 1.5Mbps DSL connection, the speed at which the pages were displayed seemed more like 56k modem speeds at times.

Professionally-Managed Media
In a typical configuration, the Prismiq MediaPlayer will be connected to a computer at one end and your AV system on the other. You could run the MediaPlayer without a computer and it would still function as a Web browser and chat client. The MediaPlayer works significantly better, however, when a computer running Prismiq's Media Manager software is also on the network. Media Manager currently runs on Windows 98SE, Me, 2000 and XP, but Prismiq is actively soliciting Apple and Mac programmers to port Media Manager to the Macintosh platform.

We installed Media Manager on an Athlon XP 1900+ machine running Windows 2000 Professional. The software immediately offered to scan folders for media files, so we pointed it to a folder containing a multitude of music and video files. It only found media files with .mpg and .mp3 extensions (*.mpe files renamed to *.mpg also worked). Media Manager also had an option to show VOB files ripped from DVD files, although we didn't test that feature. Once the software finished cataloging our media, we could access the MP3s and MPEG videos that were on our Windows machine's hard drive. MP3s sounded great, but we found that the MPEG videos we tested had lip sync problems.

When we glanced over at our DSL router, we noticed that the traffic lights were flashing like mad. A quick look at our router's outgoing traffic log showed that Media Manager was relentlessly pounding on Yahoo's sites for news, weather and stocks. This populates the home screen with news, local weather (complete with satellite photos) and stock data. When we tried to click on a story to read more about it, the MediaPlayer did nothing, however. When we turned off the MediaPlayer, we walked over to the computer and stopped the Media Server by right-clicking on the Media Manager button on the system tray. But the router still blinked away madly. We had to completely exit the Media Manager to keep it from downloading Yahoo content that we didn't need when the MediaPlayer was idle. We'd rather see Media Manager wait for a signal from the MediaPlayer that the user clicked to the home screen instead of constantly downloading content.

Room to Grow
It is a simple matter to upgrade the MediaPlayer from a computer running Media Manager on the network. It takes a little while for the update to install, but any new features offered by the update would be available immediately upon completion of the update.

Prismiq's spec page for the Media-Player promises that support for more audio and video formats (Windows Media and DivX are mentioned by name) due this summer. The remote control and keyboard also have Photos buttons to access still images and perhaps slide shows. When we pressed the Photos button, we got an error message saying that that feature was not available at this time (MediaPlayer software version 1.0pre6.) The online spec page claims support for JPEG, GIF and PNG files, but apparently this refers to the browser's capabilities when viewing Web pages.

The Verdict
While the current version of the MediaPlayer and Media Manager software are not perfect at this date, the fact that the unit is so easy to upgrade makes us enthusiastic about improvements with future upgrades. If you're ready to buy now and your media is predominantly MP3 and MPEG video, then the MediaPlayer might be a good solution for your needs. If, however, your media collection is broader than these two formats and you're as impatient as we are surfing the Web, you might find the MediaPlayer experience somewhat less than fulfilling. The low $250 price tag (with no subscription required) makes this an attractive product with a bright future.

SMART SPECS
Processor: NEC uPD61130
RAM: 64MB SDRAM
ROM: 16MB, flash
Network connections: 10/100
Ethernet, PC Card socket for
802.11b adapter
Outputs
Video: Composite, S-video
Audio: Stereo analog, coaxial, digital
Formats Supported
Video: MPEG (*.mpg)
Audio: MP3 (*.mp3)