Hands on with the GMG TVisto Pro 3500 Media Streamer

We have had the TVisto Pro 3500 in our office for a couple of weeks now and we have finally finished our hands on review. We had initially reviewed the product and thought it was a great sounding new device. The marketing surrounding it had all the right buzzwords and we were very excited to to get our hands on it. We have been playing with it for some time now and we have put it through our testing and come up with a review. Click on to read what we thought of the TVisto Pro 3500.

Lets start from the beginning and look at the interface first. The menu systems could you a lot of work. For starters the font they chose for their menu items is pretty terrible. I know you may be thinking I am nit picking here, but if you have to look at the menus a lot and they are all jagged and ugly it will detract from the overall experience. A simple font upgrade would have made the menus look a lot nicer and the overall experience that much better. As for the usability of the actual menus themselves it seems they were created by an engineer and never passed through a QA team. The menus all work and make sense, but they aren't geared towards Mom and Pop. They are very stark and you kinda have to be a geek to understand what is what. The entire device is on the other side of the spectrum from the AppleTV.

The remote is a fairly standard remote with a mostly intuitive button layout. The system seemed to have a hard time keeping up if you hit a lot of buttons in quick succession. Sometimes it would queue them up and execute all of them, other times it would just get bogged down and throw out the last few you entered. There is also a delay, often of about 2 seconds or so, between when you hit the button and when the action is taken on the device. Sometimes this leads you to believe that you didn't actually hit the button, so you hit it again, only to realize that you did in fact hit it the first time and you second hit of the button has just taken you back to where you started. This happened to us all to often and it can become very annoying very quick.

Startup time was average at about 15 seconds. This system is running an embedded version of Linux so the startup time seems consistent with an a basic embedded Linux device. We just wish they gave us a splash screen instead of a black screen so we knew something was going on. We never really knew if the device was actually starting up or not.

Video Playback

So one of the main reasons people buy these types of devices is they want it for the video streaming ability. We had mixed thoughts on how the TVisto handled its video playback. We are going to break down our review of the video aspect into two sections: network streaming and internal playback.

Internal Playback

The device has two options for internal streaming, an internal hard drive and a USB connected hard drive. We have a problem with the way the menu system deals with the USB drives. There are two USB ports on the back of the device, but in the menu system there is no clear way to determine which USB port has the media you want. You would think the USB port on the left would be USB1, but in fact it is the on the right that is USB1. Not a big deal, but something that could have been better thought out.

Video started up very quickly when we hit play and was very responsive. Using component video you will not really notice any signal degradation that you might if you chose the S-video option or Composite option. We would have like to have seen them include a true HDMI output for those who have their systems setup with HDMI and don't want to have to deal with running a separate audio cable. We don't mind as we aren't big fans of HDMI, but that is an entirely different issue :). It would have made for a more complete system and since it has that HDMI port on the back the fact that it can't output in HDMI is even more strange.

One nice feature we found while testing this unit was that it will remember your place in the last movie you watched after you hit stop. We accidentally hit stop in the movie and it brought us back to the main menu. When we selected our movie again and hit play it started back up in the place we left off. That is a nice touch and we wish that more players did this. One of the more annoying things with media playback is accidentally hitting stop instead of the button you meant and then you have to launch the movie again and search for the spot you left at. This can really take away from the overall experience and the fact that you don't have to do it with the TVisto Pro brought a smile to our face.

Overall the playback from an internal hard drive or a USB connected hard drive was very nice. This is where the device shines. Having all your movies in a such a small footprint device makes it the perfect travel companion. Just put this in your travel bag and you have a movie collection on the go.

Streaming over a network

Here is where we have a major problem with this device. It has very limited options for typing in network locations. The fact that it had no option to include an underscore for it's directory location meant it wouldn't be able to hook up to our main file server. We had to copy a bunch of files over to another machine and set it up so that it didn't have any 'special' characters as it can only add the period, colon, forward slash and the at(@) symbol. Obviously they can't have every character on their remote, but underscore is fairly common in network shares and it is confusing as to why they didn't add this, but instead chose the at symbol which we have yet to figure out where you would need it.

Streaming quality of a standard ISO was very poor. The movie seemed to drop frames fairly often when there was a lot data being pushed. Scenes with very little going did OK, but the minute there was a lot of action on the screen the movie became unwatchable as everything seemed to stutter and drop frames. This is running on a quiet network where this traffic is all that is going on. Basically there is no way you can use this as a network streamer, it should only be used to play movies off an internal HD or from a USB connected HD. Anything going over the network is going to suffer pretty severely.

Playing an AVI file seemed to have better results then playing the ISO as we didn't notice the video frame dropout that we experienced with streaming ISOs. Fast forwarding through the AVI had mixed results. Since any AVI file that you get that you didn't actually convert yourself could have a bunch of things wrong with it you might experience a host of issues. Fast forwarding through AVIs can always be tricky and so we really can't fault the device totally, but there are other devices out there that handle poorly formatted AVIs better. Overall the quality of playback was much better then the ISO. I suspect this is because the file size was much smaller and thus the amount of data that needed to be pushed was much less. I guess the CPU can't handle that much data being pushed to it.

Image Playback

Image playback was not this units strong suit as the TVisto Pro handled images rather poorly. We haven't really found many multifunction media streamers to handle images well so this didn't really come as any big surprise. There was no slideshow ability so you had to manually scroll through all of your images. On top of that, when you hit the button to bring up the next image it takes about 3 seconds for it to come up. This is far to long if you are trying to flip through some images or just show a rather quick viewing of a few images. The quality of the images was also rather poor. We saw stretching in the images that didn't show up when viewed normally on a computer and they all seem to lack crispness. A few times when switching pictures we were confronted with lock ups that lasted 15-20 seconds and made us think the entire device had crashed. It eventually came back, but not knowing what is going on for that long just makes the device look unpolished. Overall we give this device very low scores for its image playback. Even though it is very hard to do this aspect of streaming well, they have managed to do it very poorly.

Audio streaming

Audio playback was fine as there really isn't much to this aspect of streaming. Nothing really special jumped out at us. The only really thing to note was that when you select the song you want to play you get no secondary screen showing which song was playing, how long it is, how long it had been playing for. There is an info button on the remote that will bring up a screen with this info, but this is something that it should just do. Other then that it was pretty basic and just like what we said about the photo viewing, these types of devices are geared towards playing back movies and not photos and music. There are very few media streamers that can do all three well.

Conclusion

This device is a nice attempt at a full on media streamer but we now know why we didn't hear about this before it hit the market. It is a very unpolished device with many flaws. Streaming movies off of an internal hard drive or from a USB attached hard drive isn't bad at all, but trying to stream something over your network will be a major issue. The device seems to have a CPU and software that can't keep up with the heavy load put on it to stream a 4GB ISO or load a 4MB JPEG. Audio and image steaming were less then spectacular with image streaming being close to unbearable. In our opinion there are a lot of multi function devices out there that are far better then the TVisto pro. The MvixUSA 760HD beats this device in every category. Sure it is slightly more expensive, but like they say, you get what you pay for. We hope that they come out with a follow up to this product and fix the issues it has. For being this companies first attempt and a media streamer they did a pretty decent job( albeit a flawed one ). We look forward to seeing many more products for these guys.

Read More in: Audio Streaming | Image Streaming | Reviews | Video Streaming

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Posted by David Ficocello at December 22, 2007 10:28 PM