Hantech Markus 800 media player

As with all the previous reviews, connectivity of the device to any current setup will be extremely straight forward. I utilized the HDMI port into my Pioneer switch which feeds my Pioneer 508D plasma. The audio was fed into my Onkyo 875 receiver via Optical – the method I prefer over using the HDMI input on the receiver for both video and audio. The network was fed via my gigabit LAN connected to a Windows 2003 file server for media content.

Upon powering on the device a small audio file is played similar to windows start-up tune. You are then greeted by the initial boot screen followed by the main menu screen. The menu is well laid out and I suppose in time we will see customized backgrounds and icons appearing as consumers have developed for other players. It would require some aid from Novatron though as some players need the ability to switch into icon mode (like DViCo developed on their units or HTML navigation like Syabas middleware on the NMT players). Anyway, a picture of the main navigation screen…

The first three ICONS only illuminate if you have an internal HDD installed and they allow quick access to your movie, audio and photo files directly from the main menu. The next two icons allow access to any USB attached storage through the aforementioned USB host ports and finally we have the network icon which is the one everybody uses most for streaming content over the network.

On clicking the setup button from either the remote or top panel, the setup screen appears and allows configuration of the device for settings of the screen, audio, etc, and network. I must point out at this stage that the unit I was reviewing had no wireless capabilities as shown in some of the diagrams. Furthermore, the audio settings are inadequate as to avoid going into the audio setup all the time, especially with the amount of files these devices can handle, we need at least option to choose analog and digital for DTS, WMA, AC3 and AAC.

The video icon allows you to set the video refresh rate, notice here though that there are no VESA settings and no /24 for HD either. Audio icon gives you access to change from digital to stereo, it also allows the user to down mix digital DTS to 2 channel playback but as mentioned, 1 important item is missing to set different settings to different codec’s used in many files.

The ETC icon allows access to some of the more generic configurations; also this section is where you can upgrade the firmware which is currently V118.

The network icon is where you can choose to define what IP you want the player to use or simply allow it to grab its own via DHCP. (One more icon shows which is Wireless but this option is not available at this time.)