C-200 Technical Specifications

The Egreat EG-M31A belongs to the older series of NMTs, together with HD Digitech HDX 900 and Elektron’s EH-606. While the former has the honor of being first of the second tier NMT brands to get the DTS license, they used it only for the HDX 1000 and the latter failed to release any DTS downmix firmare and went ahead with a totally new platform altogether.

Worth the extra thinking before before you commit your dollars…

There is a removable harddrive slot which we presume can be replaced with a Blu-ray reader. There is also a VFD screen that seemed to have high resolution enough for a few lines of display. This could aid music playback that has been quite unfriendly in Syabas based players.

Other playback features seems to be similar to the last generation of popcorn which is already very capable.

What many popcorn users wanted is Blu-ray ISO support with full navigation menu support. This seemed to be on the cards for this player.

From the photos released, it definitely is an handsome player.

For now, readers can just oggle at the pictures and hope the playback is as good as the player looks.

Specifications

Connectivity
Bonjour
UPnP SSDP
UPnP AV
Windows Media Connect
Windows Media Player NSS
Samba
NFS
Media servers: myiHome, myiHomeLite, myiHomeMS (UPnP), MSP Portal
Third party media servers: WizD, SwissCenter, Llink, GB-PVR
BitTorrent P2P
Usenet downloader
NAS access: SMB, NFS, FTP

Web services
Video: YouTube, Vuze, Revision 3, Videocast, CNET TV, Mediafly, Veoh, Mevio, Bliptv, Break Podcast, CBS Evening News, CNN Anderson Cooper 360 Daily, CNN The Larry King Podcast, NBC Today Show, The CNN Daily, CNN In Case You Missed It, NBC Nightly News, NBC Meet The Press, CBS Face the Nation, Podfinder UK
Audio: Jamendo, iPodcast, BBC Podcast, Indiefeed, CNN News, ABC News
Photo: Flickr Photo, Picasaweb Photo, Pikeo, 23
RSS feed: Yahoo! Weather, NMT Forum, Bloglines, Cinecast, MSNBC News, Traffice Condition, Yahoo! Traffic Alerts, Yahoo! News, Weather Bug
Peer-to-peer TV: SayaTV
Internet Radio: Radio box, Live365 Radio

Media files supported
Video containers:
MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V)
MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG, DAT, VOB)
MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS)
AVI, ASF, WMV
Matroska (MKV)
MOV (H.264), MP4, RMP4

Video decoder:
XVID SD/HD
MPEG-1
MPEG-2 MP@HL
MPEG-4.2 ASP@L5, 720p, 1-point GMC
MPEG-4.10 (H.264)
BP@L3
MP@L4.0
HP@L4.0
HP@L4.1
WMV9
MP@HL
SMPTE 421M (VC-1)
MP@HL
AP@L3

Audio containers:
AAC, M4A
MPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA)
WAV
WMA
FLAC
OGG

Audio decoder:
Dolby Digital
DTS
WMA, WMA Pro
MPEG-1 Layer 1, 2, 3
MPEG-4 AAC-LC
MPEG-4 HE-AAC
MPEG-4 BSAC
LPCM
FLAC
Vorbis

Audio pass-through:
DTS, DTS-HD HR, DTS-HD MA
Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby True HD

Other formats:
ISO, IFO navigation
Rich Object Based Interactive Graphics
AVCHD navigation
Blu-ray ready (requires addition of compatible BD-ROM and at least 1GB USB stick or internal HDD)

Photo formats:
JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF

Subtitle formats:
SRT, MicroDVD SUB, SSA, SUB/IDX

DRM
Cardea DRM (WMDRM-ND)
Janus DRM (WMDRM-PD)

Chipset
Sigma Designs SMP8643, 667MHz CPU with floating point coprocessor.
Memory
512MB DDR2 DRAM, 256MB NAND Flash

Audio/Video outputs
HDMI v1.3a with CEC, 36bpp deep color, 12-bit xvYCC processing and HDCP 1.2 content protection
Component Video
S-Video
Composite Video
Stereo Analog Audio
S/PDIF Optical and Coaxial Digital Audio

Other Interface
192×64 dots white text on blue background LCD display, with software adjustable brightness and power off
Power button with standby, reset and full power down
2x USB 2.0 host at the front
2x USB 2.0 host at the back
1x USB 2.0 internal
2x SATA (one occupied by HDD tray)
3.5″ HDD tray
Internal mounting for 2.5″ HDD
2.4GHz RF Remote Control
Infra-Red Remote Control port (Infra-Red Remote Control optional)

Network
Ethernet 10/100/1000
miniPCI MII interface for 11n WiFi card (optional)

Power
100~240V AC, 50~60 Hz, max 2.5A
typical: 13 W (no additional device installed/attached)
maximum: 70 W

Dimension
Width x Depth x Height : 425mm x 290mm x 80mm (16.73″ x 11.42″ x 3.14″)

Weight
3.7kg (8.3 lbs)

Package Content
Popcorn Hour C-200 (HDD not included)

IEC 60320 C13 power cord
1.5M length HDMI cable
RF Remote Control with 2 “AAA” batteries
Quick start guide

These should make their small EG-M34A a suitable bedroom streamer where you don’t need a AV amplifier to enjoy all the DTS goodness.

Notable changes include:

• DTS Stereo downmix supported
• Fixed long playback of some TS file causing system crash
• Fixed formatting SATA HDD failure on some large capacity HDD
• Fixed further DTS dropouts in MKV.
• Add Hebrew language.

Head over here to Egreatworld to download:

EG-M31B/M34A Firmware Download
http://www.egreatworld.com/en/Support31B34A.asp

EG-M32B Firmware Download
http://www.egreatworld.com/en/Support32B35A.asp

For faster links, choose EgreatHD, hosted at the United States:

http://egreathd.com/index.php?option=com…&Itemid=63

Enjoy

Look out for their announcement in the coming weeks.

After months of waiting for the approval for DTS license, Egreat has finally gotten the signed approval from DTS Inc. Egreat users can look forward to firmwares that support DTS decoding (downmix to stereo) real soon. These can be finalised as soon as June.

Expect other abled manufacturers to follow.

Check out EgreatHD launch price of EG-M34A at USD149. With such a small set we reckon that shipping direct from Egreat to worldwide destinations shouldn’t be expensive.

Edit: EgreatHD ship worldwide directly from china and considering the small package, it should be cheaper. E.g USD149 +USD36 = USD185 to most countries in EU.

Because of its size, it will not be able to install a harddisk inside. Networking features such as streaming from NAS and media portal is retained. DTS decoding and downmixing should be available via new firmware.

From what Egreat has hinted, it will be attractively priced.

You can read the full specifications here

Let’s see how this set will compete with the WD TV.

Of particular interest to us is the BDP0821.

This player has a USB port that allows users to plug in a USB harddisk and play the formats this player supports. This includes AVI, WMV, MKV and TS files with up encoded streams of 1080p H.264, MPEG2 or VC-1. Direct stream output of AC3 and DTS audio streams is supported but not higher end codecs. Only bluray discs playback supports this.

USB drive supported is NTFS format and srt subtitles is supported too.

While this player has a ethernet port, it can only use it for accessing BD-Live content.

BDP-0821 is firmware upgradable so it remains to see if the manufacturer can build in more functions into it.

Next time we will also cover their networked media media HMC8161 (non-NMT).

For more information you can go to http://www.quan360.net/