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Arctic MC001-BD Entertainment Center Review (BD/passive)

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

  • Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
  • Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
  • Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
  • Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
  • Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
  • Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power.

The ATOM processor is not an ideal choice for such an intensive task, taking almost 1 hour and 9 minutes to complete the encoding. A fast Core i7 can complete this same task in around 10 minutes.

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11 comments

  1. No fans. id live with the lowish performance for that. looks quite nice too. Id best get entering the competition!

  2. This is purely for media and it works. win for me. I wouldnt buy it for gaming.

    No noise would be great. my girlfriend hates fans and this is quite nice looking. Its a bit bigger than the actively cooled media centers, but that is quite a heatsink over the CPU/GPU area.

  3. the two tone colour system is odd. Not sure if that would grow on me. you reckon its meant to allow people to ‘pick’ their favourite colour and to rotate it to suit in a living room?

  4. 32 bit Windows 7? what a weird choice. the caching idea is unusual too. id rather have 64 bit and the memory for windows.

  5. seems like a good enough deal, but id want my media center with a bit more grunt. not core i7, but something more capable.

    Nice idea however, its a great idea for them to produce something which doesnt make noise. Many people will embrace this.

  6. Its passive, I can forgive a few of the mistakes I think they made with this, just for that. because its extremely difficult to do.

  7. I like the two tone idea, not sure its the prettiest looking media center, but its noiseless and has a bluray drive.

    I like my PS3 however for media, but a PC would be better overall for the codec support…..

  8. I’m sort of surprised that they build a really capable system and then slapped in an Intel Atom and Windows7 32-bit. Maybe its just me but I think that they could have gotten something better as far as the processor goes and still kept the beast silent. All in all though it seems like a good idea.

  9. Thanks for the review, this looks like an interesting product. One thing I’m worried about is heat. The temperatures for CPU and GPU looked pretty high, and I wonder what the temperature of the device itself is, and how high it can reach if the room is at 30c+.

    I have to wonder why they didn’t use an AMD E-350, though. Is the Atom + GPU combination lower power or provides more features?

    By the way, I’m sure I said it before, but the “view all pages” option is a great feature of KitGuru reviews, and I wish more sites had it.

  10. ET,

    I have to agree with you on this. I want to know why they didn’t use an AMD APU for this build. The only thing that I can come up with is perhaps they were offered a significantly cheaper solution with the Atom and they took that route in an effort to keep pricing to a minimum.

  11. maybe not that bad to have the 32bits, the D525 only can address 4GB anyway, and with all the issues I met with the 64bits, I am actually happy that they use the 32bits.

    It should as well speed up the boot