Review The world isn't exactly short of devices designed to get audio-visual content from your Nas box, USB stick or external hard drive and onto your telly. The trouble is, many of them are three-legged nags let down either by grim UIs, lacklustre codec support, cheap and nasty remote controls, a simple lack of expected functionality, or all the above.

Hisense's 1080p Media Player: does exactly what it says on the box

The latest media player to land of Register Hardware's desk comes from Hisense, a Chinese company we haven't encountered before and not a name to automatically moisten our nethers. In the UK, the unit is available exclusively from online retailer Expansys.

The player is nicely understated bit of kit being little more than a shiny plastic box with a slightly domed top. At 210 x 170 x 32mm, it's small enough to be easily sited, and its 315g weight isn't going to strain whatever other bits of AV kit you sit it on. The unit itself is wholly devoid of controls and the only indication it is doing something is the standby/power LED that changes from red to green when the unit powers up.

The unit is operated entirely with its remote control, which isn't a bad of kit either. It looks like an old-style Apple Remote with ideas above its station, but unlike the Mac-oriented model, it's not too small. The buttons are logically laid out and all the controls all have a pleasant action. Batteries, however, are not included so make sure you have a couple of AAAs to hand.

For connectivity, the player has two powered USB ports and an 10/100Mb/s Ethernet socket. Happily the former have been given one whole side of the machine to themselves ensuring there is plenty of room to easily connect or disconnect two sticks or drives at a time, daft USB or cable connector designs notwithstanding.

Straightforward port array on the right (top) and left sides

Along with the Ethernet socket, the other side of the device houses an HDMI port, component-video and stereo analogue jacks – both of which Hisense supply cables for – an S/PDIF digital audio port and the 12V power socket. Some CRT owners may bemoan the lack of a Scart connector, or composite-video, but with HDMI-equipped flat-panel TVs becoming ever more common it's not a deal breaker in our view.

As well as presenting content stored on devices attached to its its USB ports, the Hisense is also fully DLNA/UPnP compatible, so as long as your Hisense unit and router are within an Ethernet cable's reach of each other you can use it to stream media directly from your PC or a suitable server.

The UI is basic, but it does the job well

The Hisense is powered by a 400MHz MIPS processor with 128MB of RAM to play about in. The net result of that rather dull fact is that UI reacts quickly to commands and the system proves nicely fleet of foot when it comes to navigating through media. We were particularly impressed by the system's ability to scan through video files at either 1.5, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32x normal speed though you can't do the same with audio files, alas.

The main menu presents three options. Media Play and Settings are self explanatory, while the File Manager functions allows you to delete or copy files to, from or between anything connected to the device.

Drill down into any of the menus and it becomes obvious the designers had a banner over their desk that read 'Keep It Simple'. So click on Media and you arrive at options to access files stored on anything connected to the two USB ports or available on network attached storage or a UPnP server. From there on, it's just a matter of drilling down to the folders you want. It's all so simple it makes the user manual redundant.

The UI itself is a thoroughly decent bit of design with all lettering and icons nicely sized for squint-free viewing from the comfort of your favourite armchair. It also has a handy in-window preview option for video content.

If we had to pick a hole, it would be the system's inability to show album artwork be it embedded or dropped into the relevant folder as a JPEG, but that's a minor gripe.

What else do you need to know?

We can't seem many people complaining about the video container and codec support, either. It's rather impressive, with WMV, MPEG 4, Divx/Xvid and H.264 codecs all catered for, along with AVI, MKV, QuickTime and MP4 containers, all up 1080p in resolution. RMVB files are also accommodated up to 720p along with MPEG 1, MPEG 2, Flash, ISO, IFO, VOB and TS files.

During our test, the unit managed to play every HD file we threw at it irrespective of type or resolution or whether it was housed on a USB hard drive or streamed from a UPnP server.

The remote's not bad, either

Audio file support is similarly comprehensive and includes MP3, Flac, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, WMA, LPCM and ADPCM.

For those of you who take your surround sound seriously, the Hisense can handle DTS-HD 5.1 and Dolby True-HD, while fans of world cinema are also catered for with the system able to recognise and interpret SubRip subtitle files.

If you fancy using your telly as a 42in digital picture frame, the Hisense supports JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG and DNG images, and comes with all the slideshow timing and effects settings you would expect to find in a dedicated device.

Of course, all this assumes your media is DRM free. If it isn't, you're stuffed. Hisense also only says that the device works with FAT- and NTFS-formatted USB storage devices, which may raise issues for Mac users unused to working with cross-platform drives.

Verdict

For less than £60, the Hisense is an effective way of getting your digital media files onto you telly without having to hook up your PC. The box itself isn't unpleasant to look at, the connection sockets are well laid out, the remote is better than we expected at this price point, and its file support excellent. Combine all that with one of the more straightforward user interfaces we've seen on a device of this type, and the Hisense is not a bad box of tricks. ®

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