Received my Himedia 600b with wifi on saturday and I had some time with the player today. The player is very cute with a nice aluminum body and VFD. I bought a 1TB WD green series HDD also. Installation of HDD was very easy. You will need to format the drive for the player to recognize it correctly. I used the format option of the player as I don't have spare SATA cable or USB 3.0 cable to connect to PC.
The firmware version was 1.0.3.4 and I upgraded it to version 1.0.4.12. Upgrading firmware is also very easy and if something goes wrong, you can always recover your player. The upgradation took just 2 or 3 minutes.
As I don't have a wifi router at home, I used a software '
connectify' to create a virtual wifi hotspot on my laptop. However it resulted in BSOD so I uninstalled it. Then I used another software
mhotspot which worked correctly. The player recognized the created hotspot and I was able to access network after entering the encryption password. Using my gprs connection I tested some internet media services like yahoo whether, some radio news channel etc. I was able to access youtube, but couldn't play files due to the super speed gprs connection. I also played an 1080p 4GB brrip from my laptop over wifi without any stutter. However copying files over wifi is a pain in the neck. I am yet to transfer my media collection to the disk for want of SATA cable or USB 3.0 cable.
Features like BT, Samba etc. are to be tested which I doubt I will never use.
In windows 7, this player becomes visible as a media player. This feature allows you to right click any media file in your pc/laptop and play it using hd600b. For this you will need to enable media streaming in windows 7. However I couldn't play files from windows 7. If anybody got it played please post how you did it.
Under network connections, the player appears with the name 'VENUS'. However I couldn't access it using the username 'root' and password 'hdpfans'.
For mp3, features like lyrics view, display of embedded album art in mp3 tag etc. are absent. Also, the genre view of songs was wrong. There is no way to split multiple artists also.
After a few hours of use, the body gets warm which is acceptable.
Overall this player is a great performer and I will recommend it to those who are looking for a good media player.
hyeah:
