Helios X5000 HD Network Media Player & 1080p DVD upscaler

Intro

The Helios X5000 is described as an "HD Network Media Player" and is released by a company called Neodigits. Previously, Neodigits have carved a name for themselves by offering a low-priced DVD player that has the distinction of upscaling standard definition discs to 1080p video. Although upscaling DVD players, which "fake" an HDTV-ish picture out of a regular DVD, are now becoming the norm, it's still the case that most of them (even at the higher end) still concentrate on going up to 1080i and not the elusive 1080p.

So, what does the X5000 do? Well, the X5000 retains the functionality of 1080p upscaling for either "NTSC" or "PAL" DVDs, giving it potential appeal right from the get-go, and, when connected to a network either through the Ethernet port on the back or using a Wireless connection, also allows you to go online (to any web site you wish, or more usefully to the HELIOS Media Portal page) to access streaming TV channels and podcasts, and also to your PC's hard drive to access music, video files, and pictures.

Yep - this machine does a lot! Read on to find out just how well.

First looks

Unboxing the X5000 revealed a power cord, a Composite video and stereo audio cable, a screw-on wireless antenna, and nicely, an HDMI cable. There's a Quick Start guide, a Setup guide, a software CD-ROM to allow the machine to access your computer, a remote control, and of course the unit itself, but more on what that looks like soon.


The remote control is small, light, and better yet, is back-lit and has nice squidgy buttons which won't chafe your fingers after hours of operation. The number buttons double up as letters, which is useful for entering URLs to access web sites and other information when you're setting the unit up. It works just like text messaging on a mobile phone does, and once you get the hang of how long a pause you need to leave between entering characters, it's easy to use. The remote also has a button to cycle through the various video output modes - of which there's plenty - and its own Volume Control and Mute buttons. These affect the player's own audio output and can't be made to control your TV, however.

The machine itself is fairly heavy, and comes across nicely, despite (or because of?) looking fairly "boxy". Although the all-black design won't wow you, the X5000 looks heavyweight and serious when it comes to looks. In fact, it actually reminds me of the looks of some high-end video processors that I've seen. Compare this to another almost identically sized and similarly simple-looking unit I've reviewed, the Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player, and the X5000 comes out as nicer looking, as it doesn't look as "cheap".

Powering on

On pressing the Power button on the front, the machine took 12 seconds to show the "HELIOS" logo and another 12 to bring up the Home screen (that's 24 seconds in total, for people who have maths skills as bad as mine). Neodigits account for this delay in the manual and claim that the machine is better thought of as a mini-computer. The wait is by no means unbearable, although do remember that I'm used to waiting two minutes for my HD DVD player to boot up!


After the short delay, you're presented with the Home Screen. From here, you can navigate either using the arrow keys or by pressing the corresponding number button on the remote's keypad. The first option allows you to play whatever disc is inserted into the machine's DVD drive, and the second is to access the HELIOS Media Portal site. Below this, any networked computers with the HELIOS sharing software installed will appear. You can choose to add these manually if you're having any trouble, but in a networking first for me, it actually worked perfectly the first time!

HELIOS Media Portal

The Media Portal is basically a web site designed specifically for the X5000 (and presumably also the lower-spec X3000 model). It lets you quickly and fairly easily access pre-selected "Podcasts", Online Music, TV and News from your living room. Disappointingly enough, my success in accessing online TV channels was mixed - the NBC Mobile feed produced garbled sound, and others simply didn't load at all. I did get to access some channels such as TeleM1 from Switzerland, and the results are better than what you'd normally expect from internet TV. I didn't get any stuttering or lag on my 2mbit NTL cable internet connection.

When it came to online music, I tried various channels out of the selection of genres presented to me. Again, some worked, some didn't - a classical music station flashed up an "UNKNOWN FORMAT" error, while others simply didn't load at all and acted as if I hadn't selected anything.

Network Streaming

Installing the "NeoLink" software from the provided CD is as easy as you'd expect - simply let the install program copy the necessary files to your hard drive, show the program where your pictures and music reside, and you're good to go. As well as serving up your Photos and Music to the player, NeoLink can also probe into your web browser's listed of bookmarked favourite sites and let you access those from the X5000 player, provided of course you use either Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer (perhaps Opera users will get their access in a later version). Upon closing the program, it suggests that it should instead remain open in your system tray, so that your data is constantly available to the player, which is a nice reminder.


As soon as I was connected to my computer, I decided to check out some movie clips. I should point out that these weren't on my own computer, but rather on another one on the network that actually didn't have the software installed. The player was able to access these with no problems at all which is excellent, and means that the Neolink software needs to only be installed on one "main" computer in the network.

The X5000 appears to play WMV HD clips correctly, but because of the limitations of my wireless router, I wasn't able to watch at full speed (that's me told for not buying the full spec model of the router!) I should also point out that although the X5000 technically CAN play Windows Media clips that use the obnoxious Digital Rights Management scheme, the process of accessing these is a little less straightforward.

I also had success in playing .AVI files encoded with the DivX and Xvid codecs - which means that most video files you find online should be playable. Strangely however, on video clips that had accompanying soundtracks compressed with MP3, these videos were silent, which worried me as MP3 is a a very common method of compression for video file audio tracks on the web. Of course, standard MPEG files worked fully as expected (is there a video playing device out there that DOESN'T play MPEG?)

After that, I tried out the music playback capabilities of the X5000 to play back some MP3 files. This worked entirely as expected, and even gave me a slide-show of sample images in the background.

I was a little surprised to see an "Online Media" button in the "NeoLink" screen on the player. This gave me the chance to access my PC's Web Bookmarks, "Podcast Alley", "Newsweek On Air", "SHOUTcast Pop", Yahoo News, and RealNetwork's Rhapsody music service. This is all well and good, but I was a little puzzled as to why these options weren't in the same place as the online functions I'd seen previously - having them all in one place would have been cleaner.

Web Browsing

The X5000's remote control is home to a button called "URL", which lets you key in a web address using the numbered buttons, in the same manner as text messaging on a mobile phone. From there, the Volume Up and Down keys let you scroll the page, and the directional buttons let you jump to links on-screen. As you'd probably expect, the web browsing functionality is no substitute for a proper PC - the load times are slower and the pages don't always render exactly how you'd expect. Still, no web site I visted was unusable on the X5000.

DVD Picture Quality

With the additional features covered, I decided to take a look at the DVD playback facilities of the X5000, which I imagine will be its main purpose for many. The first disc I popped in was, surprisingly for me with my NTSC-centric collection, a European PAL one. This is where I came across problem number one: the X5000 was set to output in 720p/60hz mode, and it did so. This is actually bad, because the disc I was playing was designed to be viewed at 50hz. The X5000 should have detected the intended video standard of the disc and output in the correct scan rate, but since it didn't, the video playback was noticeably jerky.

Although this "pseudo standards conversion" functionality will please people living in the US, Japan, or another country that doesn't get multi-system TVs as standard yet, from my European perspective, it's really just an annoyance. Since European and Australasian HDTV owners are lucky enough to get 50/60hz capable displays as standard, I'd really appreciate it if Neodigits would add an "Output DVD at native scan-rate" or similar option into the player setup screens so the player would change between modes automatically. The people I spoke to at Neodigits were extremely receptive of this idea (unlike certain other electronics companies I've talked to), so fingers crossed that this will make it in via a firmware upgrade. In the mean time, cycling through the various modes by pressing "TV MODES" on the remote is necessary, and fairly tedious, to ensure the best quality playback.

I was very pleased to see that the player ignored regional codes out of the box. This was an excellent first impression.

Video playback: NTSC Film

The first disc I chose to demo the film playback capabilities of the X5000 was the NTSC Criterion Collection version of The Rock. Thanks to the lack of excessive filtering (like most DVDs suffer from), this version of the film shows an incredible amount of detail. The machine did a very good job of displaying the disc, but I noticed that the image had a noticeably punchier look to it that on my other two players (more on why this is later). The other players I compared the X5000 with were my Toshiba HD-A1 HD DVD player, and also my old faithful Panasonic DVD-S97. I set all players to both 720p and 1080i output modes and the X5000 came out as no worse in terms of picture detail than any of the other players.



Above: when the disc is great and its type is right, the X5000 can produce very high quality upscaled pictures.
When I tested some animated titles, I noted that the X5000 has no problems that will become apparent with large areas of flat colour - it's free of the Macroblocking Enhancement Error (MBE), an error that exaggerates compression artefacts that Faroudja-based players suffer from; there's no trace of the Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE) which gives coloured edges a jagged appearance, and there's no ringing or glowing around colours, either. This is an excellent result.

Using a copy of the AVIA Guide to Home Theater test disc, I took a look at some Resolution patterns using the X5000 outputting in 720p. First of all, I tried the "100 TVL Wedge Resolution" card. Using both the in-box HDMI cable and my own cable, there was a near-constant but hard to notice "rippling" error on the most complicated parts of the patterns. I've never seen this artefact before using when using an all-digital connection. In addition, there was always some level of very, very light video noise visible on the screen from an unrealistic viewing distance, which puzzled me. Do remember however that this is a videophile measurement and I never spotted it while actually watching films!

Video playback: NTSC TV Shows (Interlaced)

For TV shows, I used my usual American test discs: the Adult Swim show "Home Movies", and my old favourite, "The Ren & Stimpy Show". Both are animated and have enough scenes that are fairly bright, and "Ren & Stimpy" has a large amount of high quality animation (in other words, a lot of movement), making them ideal for detecting deinterlacing flaws.

Unfortunately, deinterlacing flaws are something that the X5000 has in abundance. How much you notice them will depend on the quality of the material, with all-digital, clean video being the most affected. For example, the oldest "Ren & Stimpy" cartoons are from the early 90s and are sourced from Composite broadcast tapes, which were videotape transfers of fairly grainy film stock. The X5000's deinterlacing doesn't really make footage of this quality much worse. Much of "Home Movies", on the other hand, was animated in Macromedia Flash a decade later, which means that the rough deinterlacing becomes immediately noticeable to the point of distraction. The best deinterlacing I've seen on a DVD player up until now is still the Faroudja chipsets (although these chipsets introduce new flaws of their own).

Judge for yourself the difference between the X5000 when put head-to-head with the best in-player deinterlacing I've seen:


For interlaced video, the entire screen has fairly obvious judder, and on movement, the deinterlacing circuitry doesn't do a very good job of preserving detail at all and is actually worse than my HDTV's own on-board Deinterlacing (I got better results by setting the machine to output 480i and let my TV do the job instead). The bottom line of this is simple: if you use the X5000 to watch TV shows, most of the time, you'll see very obvious jagged lines. The usual applies - for animation, it's obviously very noticeable - for live action, less so.

All the same, this puzzled me, because Neodigits touts the X5000 as using the Sigma Designs EM8620L Series Chipset. Examining the datasheet for this chip reveals that one of its features is Motion adaptive Deinterlacing. Personally, I expected better results from a chip with this as one of its key features.

Video playback: NTSC Interlaced Movies

The American release of Dario Argento's "The Card Player" is an interlaced film release. That means that all, or close to all of the resolution of the original film can be extracted with a player that's good at detecting the 3:2 Pulldown pattern. In other words, all of the picture information is there on the disc, just in a fairly cryptic way that the player has to try and re-order for the best results.

The X5000 did not pick up on the 3:2 Pulldown pattern, which didn't surprise me too much given the less than stellar deinterlacing performance I'd already seen. This means that the player is not resolving the full resolution available on the disc, and that jagged lines were visible.

I must point out that only a minority of titles are mastered using this method (and it only affects NTSC discs), and that Progressive flags - basically pointers for Progressive Scan DVD players to avoid problems like this - are very much the norm. NTSC Discs authored this way look great on this player. I see good performance with Interlaced Films as more as a bonus than a requirement, as it's really up to the disc creator to use the best possible mastering techniques - especially when you consider that there are freely available video tools for Windows that will properly convert Interlaced movies to Progressive Scan properly.

Video playback: NTSC video (60i)

"Jackass: The Movie" was filmed on video, and the American DVD is presented interlaced (in 60i format). Again, the X5000's deinterlacing does a watchable but not brilliant job of this tricky video camera material.

Another example comes from many of the Behind the Scenes videos on "Toy Story: The Ultimate Toy Box" (now out of print) - nothing came across as particularly objectionable about the deinterlacing on material such as this, except for the constant judder the picture has that becomes visible up close.

Video playback: PAL Movies

Using the SuperBit disc of "Hannibal" - another excellent but not perfect video transfer - the X5000's results were unexpected. I was expecting similarly perfect playback of Film material as I noticed on NTSC discs (or at least, NTSC discs mastered using the best techniques). The theory is the same; for Film content, the player should be recovering most, if not all, of the available resolution. Oddly, the X5000 did not pick up correctly on the fact that it had been fed a FILM disc (like my Panasonic DVD-S97 player did). The Panasonic player uses a Faroudja chipset, which is renowned for being extremely skilled at this task, for its deinterlacing, so the X5000 was up against one of the best.

I tried the PAL version of "Panic Room" and the problem still occured in areas such as the corduroy trousers Jodie Foster wears in the last daytime scene. In fact, its problem with PAL film discs was similar to that of the Pioneer DV-490V that I reviewed earlier in the Summer - like it, the X5000 threw away resolution on motion in PAL films and presented a jaggy effect.

Oddly, the X5000 DID manage to play one of the PAL films I tried without any problems - the UK DVD of Howl's Moving Castle. This film looked fantastic on the X5000 and leaves me completely baffled, because on the last DVD player I reviewed with deinterlacing issues, this disc also failed to show the problem. Sadly, this release was the exception rather than the norm, and out of all the PAL discs I went through trying to recreate the fault, "Howl's Moving Castle" was the one of two that played correctly.

Video playback: PAL video (50i)

The picture quality from PAL video playback produced good results. The deleted scenes on the "Peep Show Season 2" are in 50i format (although the finished show itself is digitally treated to give the "film look") and the handheld camera filming style is usually good for sniffing out any excessive jagged diagonals.

"Blacker Than Black" Test

In the weird world of video and computers, the value that represents Black is not the same between systems. This means that if a DVD player goes out the door using a video component that's configured for working in the Computer world, the darkest variations of black will vanish into one. This is called "clipping".

DVDs that feature the THX Optimizer (in other words, a lot of Disney and LucasFilm titles) contain a useful detection tool for this - the second video test pattern that instructs you to set the Brightness. On a player that correctly passes Blacker Than Black (BTB) video, the THX logo will appear with a shadow below it, and the screen will feature 10 different gradiations of grey along the top and bottom of the screen.

On the X5000, the THX logo appeared without its shadow when using the Component video connection at 720p, so the player didn't pass the test. Sadly, over HDMI, the X5000 actually produced the worst result in this area that I've seen. While I'm used to seeing DVD players that either show the shadow underneath the THX logo (correct), the THX logo but no shadow underneath it (annoying but not major), the X5000 actually failed to show the THX logo and several of the grey boxes at all. This means that a fairly significant amount of detail is being lost and that at times, extreme dark areas will appear as "black holes" rather than subtle gradiations into dark. This accounts for why I noticed that, compared to my other players, the image had a more "punchy" look - the black level on this player is incorrectly set.

Just to be sure, I verified that the problem occurred using both NTSC and PAL DVDs, and also modified the player's own Brightness and Contrast controls (sometimes necessary to make Blacker Than Black shades appear). Nothing would make the THX logo screen appear correctly. Below are the results of all three players I performed the Blacker Than Black test on (please note that my TV brightness is turned up on purpose, to clearly show the differences):


As you can see, this is another aspect of the X5000 that definitely needs improvement. I talked to Neodigits Support about the problem and it's being investigated, so again, fingers crossed for a firmware fix. Apparently, improvements to the X5000's video driver are always being made, so here's hoping this issue will get the boot sooner rather than later.

Responsiveness and Layer Change

One area in which the X5000 excels beyond all the other players I've ever used was its responsiveness. In fact, the only machine that responds to commands faster than this is my PC, using DVD playback software. It was a breeze to move around any of the disc menus I used, and the response from the unit's own on-screen menus was only just slower.

Similarly, the layer change speed is also very good. I used my usual test disc - Invader ZIM Volume 3, Disc 1. This disc has a layer change placed in the middle of a sentence. The X5000 continued its impressive responsiveness performance with less than 1 second of delay in the change-over, and no loss of audio on the first few seconds after the change.

Conclusion

The X5000 is an ambitious concept. Unfortunately, the end result has a number of usability and performance issues that spoil the fun - the most serious being the incorrect Black level. Having to switch between 50 and 60hz manually is also an unnecessary annoyance. Furthermore, whilst reviewing the player, I often had to reset the unit after powering it on due to getting a scrambled video display (and even then, I sometimes had to fight with the machine to get it to produce sound). Lockups also became fairly frequent.

That said, if you're watching almost exclusively Progressively-flagged NTSC films (that's a good 99% or so of the NTSC film DVDs available), then there's a lot to like about its DVD upscaling capabilities. That, however, might prove a little limiting for most, and if you have a lot of interlaced material (TV shows) or PAL DVDs and would make limited use of network capabilities, then clearly the X5000 will have little to offer you. But, if you can make a few picture quality sacrifices for the potential convenience of being able to access the contents of your PC's hard drive from your couch, then the X5000 certainly offers one way to get the job done, and will hopefully continue to improve thanks to firmware updates.

At US $579, I can't help but think people wanting some form of less extensive media playback might be better served by an Xbox 360 (which has its own limitations, but is a far more polished product). My own primary "disc spinner" is still my American HD DVD player which does not only play true HD discs, but also does an equally good job of upscaling films and a decidedly better job of interlaced playback (I still rely on the Panasonic DVD-S97 I've mentioned so much for PAL discs, as the HD DVD player is a US import).

To conclude, Neodigits have given us a versatile player that I hope can be improved through firmware upgrades. That'll need to happen before I can well and truly recommend it to everyone, especially the videophiles that Neodigits claim the player was built for. Here's hoping that they take the initiative and get the final review score for this player up a good few notches.