TESTING METHODOLOGY - RESULTS 

   After thinking it over i have decided on performing the same exact tests for all the Media Players i review. This occurred right after some of you emailed me while on my previous position asking for a more reliable methodology when testing such players/recorders. To be honest this may complicate things but it should also save me quite a bit of time in the process. So from now and on testing will be performed with the help of 4 specific MKV media files and several BDISO (when possible), MOV, RMVB and AVI ones, with bitrates of up to 35Mbps, something which as many of you know is not easy to come by. Of course the 4 specific MKV files are ones i ripped myself from 5 Blu-Ray titles i currently own in order to not only manage to hit the desired bitrate of up to 35Mbps but also use specific, high detailed scenes. My good old SONY 55A2000 (already 3+ years old but still my favorite) along with my latest Panasonic TX-P42S20 are the two screens i will be using for testing. In due time and when i finally see a 3D Screen that really makes me want to buy it i will also start using 3D material for testing but currently that is simply not possible and so i can't comment on 3D results. As for sound the audio/video amplifiers used with the two screens are the Yamaha RX-650 and the Yamaha RX-V463 coupled with 5.1 systems by TANNOY and Crystal Audio.

     The first hardware media player i ever tested that carried the android OS was the TViX Xroid A1 and back then i was somewhat excited to see such a solution, until of course i started testing and problems started to appear one after the other (most of those were later resolved but still the unit was far from perfect). Today android based hardware media players have improved quite a bit but still are not what they should be and so although they offer amazing menu detail and countless applications for you to choose from in the end no matter how you see it the android OS was never designed for such use. Because of that the Prodigy Black slows down quite a bit when you start using android compatible applications. Perhaps the Realtek RTD1186DD chipset is simply not powerful enough to sustain android OS usage but the why is not as important as the end result. On the other hand however the Prodigy Black excels when playing Full HD media and it can even reproduce the heaviest media files i have (even a 30GB MKV rip of the latest Avengers BD) with very good image and audio quality. Since the Prodigy Black is based on the latest Realtek RTD1186DD solution it can also playback BDISO files successfully and without serious slowdowns in the menus (happened a few times with the Avengers BDISO). We did encounter some slow data transfer rates when using the Gigabit Ethernet connection but that only happened a couple of times when transferring extremely large media files. The dual DVB-T MPEG4 decoder worked ok although we had to scan twice in order to find every available channel (it missed two the first time).

     Bellow you will find 4 different screenshots from the 4 specific MKV media files i mentioned above featuring bit rates between 20 and 35Mbps. The resolution has remained unchanged (however the files are compressed to JPEG to save space on the server) at 1920x1080.