Last night I hooked up the Pro in my Living Room setup and here I found the following observations which I am bringing to everybody's attention here:
Looks wise its identical to etrayz the NAS solution provided by the Xtreamer team, so its just slightly bigger then couple of 3.5" HDD kept on top of each other. The box construction is solid and the package comes with all the necessary cables needed for installation, including a chepo chinese HDMI cable. The power brick is as big as any Laptop adaptor but nicely built.
Once fired up the first thing that comes to notice is that the bootup time, which is almost half of what the 1st Generation Xtreamer needs, then comes the first screen and I must say that the GUI is rather impressive, otherwise all the menu options and settings are identical to the old Xtreamer unit.
In my Setup I connected the pro through HDMI to my AVR and a cat 6 cable to my Linksys Router which is connected with my etrayz unit. Now in the settings menu there is no option of HD audio which was promised during its launch. I first played a complete Blu Ray transfer of Transformers 2 which is stored on my etrayz through the Pro and it played it with full 1080P @24frames per second glory on my Full HD Projector Screen and I must say that the picture quality was as close to a dedicated blu ray player but no where as close to Oppo BDP-83 which I would take as a reference here, as I could notice slight picture noise on the close up scenes.
Now came the part when I wanted to test out the HD audio part as it said on the box of the unit that it could decode Dolby True HD out of the box and same was also promised during the launch of this unit, but when I tested a couple of Blu Ray clips of Star Trek BD on this unit then on the info page on the screen it showed that Dolby True HD was the Audio Track but Pro was downmixing it to 2 channel and on my AVR it was displayed as Dolby Pro Logic II with two channel signal input. With the Lossy DTS and Dolby also I noticed a little drop in the volume level even after I had maximised the volume level on the Pro, otherwise there are no more grudges.
Now came the part when I really wanted to check etrayz integration, when its contents are played simultaniously with 2 or more units seperately on two seperate setup in the same household, so I kept my Living room setup running and then turned on old Xtreamer unit in my Bedroom setup which is connected via ethernet with an Apple Airport Express on 5 GHz Band of my Linksys Router. As soon as I turned on the Xtreamer and started selecting media on the etrayz my entire setup froze i.e Hanged, and at that point even the Pro stopped working and hanged so I had to turn off everything My etrayz, router, Xtreamer and Pro and then restart all of them. After that I turned on the Pro and left it playing a Full HD content, then turned on the Xtreamer in my Bedroom and walla this time it played things without any fuss so I had ultimately achived multi room playability of media stored onto my etrayz.
My conclusion to all the above leads me to the fact that Pro is a beautifully built media player unit and for those who are looking for Massive storage facility onto the media player should buy it, otherwise the Xtreamer unit is self sufficient, also I would say that people looking for HD Audio downmixing should wait till the same has been achieved, as we all know that the same thing was also promised to us when we bought our old units but now things have changed and those units are not allowed to get the HD Audio Downmixing.
