Black Boxes: Niveus Media ONEbox Media Center

by Charles Fulton
Winter 2003/Spring 2004

It's indisputable that DVRs are good. But how about a DVR that's also a CD player, a DVD player, a digital audio jukebox, and a digital picture viewer? Niveus Media has put together a potent brew in the ONEbox Media Center, an all-in one unit that does all of the above, and also appeals to our geeky side.

The ONEbox is a handsome, silvery box that is a bit narrower than a typical home entertainment component, but is slightly taller than most of today's VCRs. The front panel consists of just two panels and two buttons.

Pincushion or Entertainer?
The unit contains a mind-boggling number of ports. We've seen stereo receivers that didn't have as many ports as the ONEbox. (Well, we're exaggerating a bit, but still, there are a truly remarkable number of ports on this unit.) Behind the large, top pop-down panel, there is a DVD-ROM drive and a memory card reader (which reads CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MultiMedia Card and SD cards). The second pop-down panel hides FireWire and USB ports, as well as a microphone input and a headphone jack.

The rear panel gives away the ONEbox's secret: it's actually a computer in disguise. Anyone who's looked behind their computer will immediately recognize the unit's ATX-style port aperture. The rear panel includes a few things you will probably never use, including PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and a parallel printer port, along with some things you might be able to use depending on your geekitude, such as the unit's serial port.

The computer lineage of the ONEbox also gives it a lot of flexibility. You can easily use it with a computer monitor in a small space, like a den or a dorm room. You can use its analog audio output, or its coaxial digital audio output.

The Quiet Treatment
The unit is based on the VIA M10000 motherboard, running a VIA C3 processor. Even at 1GHz, this is a fairly cool-running processor, so its cooling needs are not as dramatic as the Pentium 4 processors found in a typical Windows XP Media Center Edition computer. The reduced need for fans keeps the system fairly quiet.

The unit we tested included an 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA hard drive, which is one of the quietest 7200 rpm hard drives on the market. (A model with a 160GB hard drive is also available.)

Where Does This go?
Our review unit didn't have the best documentation provided, but we expect shipping units to include more documentation. The sheet instructed us to make the primary audio and video connections to the ATI (top) video card, rather than the connections on the ATX aperture.

We were confused about getting analog audio out of the unit, until we realized what the Cable Installation sheet was trying to tell us: the analog audio cable from the ATI card was to be connected to the blue audio connection on the ATX aperture. From there, make the connection to your speakers or A/V system from the green output connector on the ATX aperture. (Additionally, the Cable Installation sheet had the S-video, video and VGA connections on the motherboard grayed out, so we assume they are disabled by default on the shipping unit.

We attached an off-air antenna to the ATI card. The unit also ships with a purple ATI "Bob" (er, break-out box), through which you can connect a satellite receiver, cable box, camcorder, what have you.

The unit does not come with a modem. If you're broadband-impaired, you might not get a lot of use out of the unit's 10/100 Ethernet connection. Of course, with a little bit of configuration, you could easily add a USB modem.

Booting Up
We half-expected to see Linux initialization messages scrolling on the screen as the unit booted, but the box surprised us with the gentle fade-in of a Windows XP Home Edition boot screen, yielding to the Windows XP Welcome screen, before showing the ONEbox home screen.

The home screen lets you go directly to television, video files (both recorded TV shows and other media files that you've downloaded over the Internet), DVD, JukeBox (digital music stored on the hard drive), CD, Picture Viewer and ShowGuide (with listings from TitanTV.)

In Control
The unit comes with an X10 RF remote that includes mouse-pointer navigation (along with left and right buttons) and a group of standard up/down/left/right/select navigation. In addition, it's a full-function universal remote that can also learn commands from other units. Say what you will about X10's pop-under ads on the Web, but this is a truly excellent remote control.

Let's Play
Once you've set up ShowGuide and programmed a few shows to record, you can delve a little deeper into the settings and specify recording settings, including the video compression codec to use (i.e. you can capture MJPEG for best quality and lowest processor utilization, then recompress the show.) The ONEbox offers MJPEG (motion JPEG), WMV and a Low Loss codec. This allows you to get the highest-quality recordings from the smallest number of bits. Overall, we found that the quality of recorded programs was very good. We appreciated the amount of control that the ONEbox offered to us.

To switch between windowed and full-screen modes, just use the remote's Menu button. The program window takes up about a quarter of the screen in windowed mode.

The CD screen allows you to rip and encode your CDs on the fly. The unit includes an internal snapshot of the FreeDB music database, which includes song titles, album names and cover images. Once you rip your CDs, you can access your music via the JukeBox, where you can generate playlists and display visualizations.

If you've brought digital images into the ONEbox, they're perfect fodder for a slideshow. Just enter the Picture Viewer, choose play, and press menu to go into full screen mode. Your ONEbox just became a party in a box.

What's That Say?
One of the few areas of improvement for the ONEbox is that the fonts it uses for the ShowGuide are on the small side. Therefore, we'd highly recommend using the ONEbox either with a computer monitor or a television with an S-video input.

Take Me Home Tonight
The ONEbox is available in a multitude of configurations on their web site. You can either buy a preassembled unit, or for the same price, buy the components and build it yourself. The web site also includes Gyration wireless keyboards and pointing devices, replacement remote controls, and a bevy of Linksys 802.11g wireless networking equipment.

The icing on the cake is that there are no subscription fees associated with the ONEbox. Once you buy the box, it's yours, including the listings.

We had a lot of fun exploring the ONEbox. The remarkably self-contained unit has power to spare, and its friendly interface will appeal to any Smart TV aficionado-whether or not they're as geeky as we are.

III SMART SPECS
Operating System: Windows XP Home
Processor: VIA C3, 1GHz
Memory: 256MB DDR
Hard Drive: 7200 rpm, 80GB, 2MB cache
Optical Drive: DVD-ROM
Video Inputs: S-video, composite
Audio Inputs: microphone, analog stereo
Video Outputs: S-video, composite, VGA
Audio Outputs: analog stereo (1/8 mini jack), coaxial digital audio, headphone
Data I/O: 10/100 Ethernet, FireWire, USB 2.0, Parallel, Serial
Memory card slots: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MultiMedia Card, SD Card

Company: Niveus Media, Inc.
Phone: (866) 258-2929
Web: www.oneboxmc.com
Price: $899