Xperinet

just go through coding on and playing with our first one.. What did you want to know?

Kevin D.

It works well enough for a demo server in our new store, but we might have some issues when we actually sell one to a customer.

First the bad:

No auto downloading of info. 95% of the time you have to go in and rename the title and then search for info. 5% you can just load details based on what the VOB file is called, but then you still have to rename the title.

Cover art is tiny and close to useless. There's no search by cover and on my 73" at the house, the cover art in the description is close to actual size.

It only rips the largest VOB file by default. You have a preview function to see if that's the one you want. On some dual discs it picked the fullscreen version and I had to go back and pick the widescreen.

Due to the above, no menus, no extras, just the movie is ripped. Also, it doesn't rip chapter definitions. It gives you a TIVO like control of +/- min, med, max.. Where min is around 30seconds, med is 5 minutes, and max is 15 minutes. It's actually pretty easy to navigate unless you have a demo disc that you want to go direct to a certain demo.

On the single unit, only one output is supported, VGA/DVI or svideo. VGA will scale to 720p or 1080i though. In whole-house situations where VGA would go to HD sources and svideo would go to a matrix switcher, you will need a second client piece running svideo out.

No feedback as to whats going on or playing.

On the good side:

Easy API... RS232 or TCP. Real English commands.. Play = "'Play',13,10" Direct commands to sort by XXXX and play movie XXX

Very basic commands. You could get pretty full control with only 15 pushes.. Editing will require a keyboard page. Would be extremely easy for customers

Very nice web based diagnostics. It can also email you if there are issues.

Cheaper than the rest. Standard PC hardware and linux based software.

Tech support is awesome.

CD update is in final stages of release. Will allow ripping of CD and management of those. A new API is supposed to be released later that gives full feedback for everything.

Overall, not a bad product. It does exactly what it's supposed to. I get the feeling that once it was working they sent it out. Now they are getting busy building product when they should have been adding all the things to the software you would think would be standard.

Kevin D.