Sumvision Cyclone Micro Media Player
Posted by Notcot on Jun 14, 2010 in Home Cinema & Video |
- Plug and Play support for USB storage and MMC/SD/MS/SDHC device
- Upscale playback of standard media files to 1080p resolution
- Fast forward; rewind; zoom; pause; and repeat functions
- USB support for Enclosures; Card readers and Flash drives
- Upscale resolution to 480p/576p; 720p; 1080i; 1080p via HDMI interface
I being 17 years old am constantly short of money. Hence I came up with the idea of getting rid of all my CDs and DVDs and just have raw data on my computer which can be downloaded for free. However, I had a major problem. I had to play everything on my laptop and it doesn’t have the best quality picture or sound. I love music and movies. They are both a big part of my life so not having a good unit to experience both was a problem.
When I found the Cylcone micro I thought it wouldn’t work. It’s so small and how can it play videos when windows xp can’t play videos without codecs. I don’t know how, but by some sort of wizardry it plays a lot of my files.
I say “a lot” and not “all” because some AVIs cannot be played but this seldom happens. and even if it can’t read it, they can be converted quite easily in under 10 minutes to a format it can play.
I have everything media and data related on a Western Digital 500 gb hard drive. Plug in and go.
Some people have been complaining about the remote but I find it ok to use, the only problem being you have to point at the tiny cyclone in the corner and not the TV, no big deal though.
I have heard of it totally formatting other customer’s hard drives. I think this might be down to poor choice of hard drive. With something as fragile as an HDD holding 500gb of space it’s best to not settle for less. I researched WD and they seem to be one of the biggest companies in external hard drive technology and it hasn’t let me down at all, even when using it with the cyclone.
I Love how it can be played through HDMI and AV. HDMI is as you would probably guess, a lot better, but the AV is only a composite at the end of the day. I’m not a quality monger though, I just love movies, I don’t care about how good quality it is. To those who do, make sure you own an HD TV. The AV is watchable but not spectacular. The sound is good no matter what! in my house theres an HD TV in the living room which is usually occupied and a regular TV in my room so I have to use AV.
Some people were also complaining about it not being able to recognise sub folders. I thought when I heard this it would be like a PS3 where it would show you how smart it is by being able to find all files without browsing them, and then fail. The cyclone micro for me recognise all my folders. Sure, it is quite windows 95 but once it plays a file you don’t care, and it allows you to be creative with your organisation of files.
Also recognises my small Toshiba 40gb external HDD and a 4gb SD card I use for my camera.
Why you should buy this :
Play all movies you have on a USB device,
View pictures and play MP3 and other formatted files,
Never have to trail a cable from computer to TV again,
Aren’t movies always better on the sofa than on the office chair?
It’s only 20 quid!
Why you shouldn’t buy this :
If you are picky about AV quality,
Are not patient enough to convert files when needed to,
If you have a cheapo HDD that won’t work well,
The micro can glitch and have to restart if you browse large files to quickly or files far away from each other, (e.g. Play a song by America then immediately follow it up with one from ZZ Top),
the small remote if you have fat hands,
if you are expecting this to be the best viewing experience ever (it is not, but I still love it!)
Alternatives :
Maplin have some DVDs with upscalers built in, they might work a bit better, but doubt they will have HDMI,
Watch movies on your computer and end up destroying your keyboard with your XL Pepsi,
Trail a big cable from computer to TV, and deciding what cable actually works,
Actually buy the movies…
In short, this thing is a great product, if I had bought everything I have ran through this it should have 100s of pounds, but instead for more convenient use it has only costed around £20. I love this product!
Rating: 5 / 5
Incredible. A solid, well-built and reliable product about the size of an IPOD. Plugged in straight out of the box, connected my external hard drive, selected AV on my TV and there it was, working perfectly. No software uploads, no configuring, no complexity at all. Simply plug it in and away you go. I did not purchase the additional cables which were recommended as you are supplied with an AV 3-into-1 cable (red, yellow, white into Black). This gives a great quality already without having to pay any more. A really quality product which does exactly what it says on the box. All of my own movies are stored on a Toshiba external hard drive and range from xVid, AVI, MPEG4 and they all work well. The menu shows the files and folders that you have already created on your hard drive and allows easy access using the supplied remote control. I cannot recommend this product highly enough. The future of movie playing at a very reasonable cost.
Rating: 5 / 5
When recently considering my media player/streamer options I opted for a Seagate FreeAgent 500gb portable drive and the Sumvision Cyclone Micro. At first I was pleased, it offered me the same functionality as my Philips DVD player but without the hassle of burning files to DVD/CD. Then I started to notice a few problems which have become increasingly annoying and will probably lead me to replace this device.
The first wasn’t too bad, but is annoying. It seems an NTFS formatted hard drive will contain both the short filename (I.Am.L~1.avi) and a long filename (I.Am.Legend.avi). Although the device will display the long filename, it will SORT by the short filename. Therefore, if you have a series of shows in the format “30 Rock S04E01″ they will not be sorted because the device only sees “30 Roc~1.avi”.
The second problem which is quite serious is that the device freezes on me if I pause more than a minute or two. This is a killer on the “wife approval factor” that we can’t stop for a cup of tea without a major hassle. I suspect the Seagate Freeagent drive has some energy saving feature so when the device is paused for a couple minutes the drive probably spins down. Then when we return and press play, the Sumvision is incapable of spinning the drive back up and resuming play. The only workaround I’ve found is to take note of where we are (35 minutes) and take advantage of the GOTO feature which allows you to restart the movie and jump to any point. Interestingly if I leave for 5 minutes and press play again, sometimes I get a message saying “Can not read device. Do you want to format?”. Other times the device just becomes nonresponsive and I need to press and hold the power button on the remote for 10 seconds to get it to restart.
In relation to the second problem, you can’t press the stop button and then press the play button and resume where you left off. Instead you will start again from the beginning.
In addition, be aware that the device won’t support any exotic files so don’t expect playback of wmv or mp4 files. There seems to be no way to upgrade the firmware, so don’t hold your breath that an update may improve this.
Last, I wanted to contact Sumvision support regarding the problems above. There isn’t even a support area or contact link on their web site. If you have problems, you are on your own. Still, at this price if you can stand some annoyances maybe you can live with it. But there is no doubt you get what you pay for.
Rating: 2 / 5
my number one reason for buying this was to play ISO files from my DVDs when traveling. It does this perfectly and for the price is much cheaper and smaller than anything else i’ve seen. Being able to use different USB hard disks is really nice since before I used an all in one media player/hard disk.
The only trouble I had was formatting the USB external disk since it would not recognize an NTFS disk formatted on my PC. It would say the disk had to be formatted again – which it formatted in FAT32 (no option as to which file system to use when formatting). Workaround so far is to let it format the disk in FAT32, then put the disk back on the PC, delete the partition and create it again in NTFS. Then the cyclone recognizes the disk as NTFS.
It played a couple of avi files I gave it but I didn’t do extensive tests on what codecs it will support, but the DVD ISO image is most important for me. Many players (even WD TV) don’t handle ISO.
There was enough power from the USB socket to work with several different 2.5″ USB hard disks I tried, both SATA and IDE type, only my old Abigs 2.5″ hard disk/media player caused trouble and would not spin up due to power requirements but a plain hard disk enclosure worked ok.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m currently waiting for my third (and last) unit. The first player died after only a week and the second didn’t last much longer before the power supply packed up. It did continue to work with a new 5v power supply but for less than 2 weeks before the light went out for good. Its a shame as when it does work it’s an excellent product.
Rating: 2 / 5