Got a Dune Base 3.0

[BMXTRIX]

So, I had been undecided between the Dune and the Popcorn Hour, but finally opted to give the Dune a try to see how things went.

So far, I'm pretty darn happy with the results, but have a ways to go.

I unboxed the player and it was pretty much looking like a standard A/V piece of gear. Turns out to work a bit more like a PC piece of gear, which is definitely learning curve intensive.

I installed a 2 TB hard drive into it (VERY EASY!) and got my network stuff setup which was a bit of a pain, but kind of easy. Then I started on the long road process of installing Zappiti which is a cover flow plugin for the Dune. It is awesome. Period.

I'm slowly working on the process of creating ISOs of all my DVDs (about 400) but I already have almost my entire collection in MP4 format for my AppleTV (sucks) and my iPod, so I setup Zappiti to get cover art and create a disc collection for my MP4s as well as the new discs I was putting on the Dune directly.

About 30 minutes or so later it had created a complete list with cover art and disc information for MOST of my discs. Some discs it couldn't find easily, so I could manually enter cover art if I wanted to. I did on a few just to get the feel of it. Worked well enough.

The support forums (MPC Club) are about as good as I could hope for with excellent responses to some of the technical questions I had which did bug me. The documentation is, at best, mediocre. But, really, once I had it on my network, getting things to play and browsing to them was easy enough for me, but just wasn't pretty. Zappiti is really what makes this product shine for me as it will open up the ability for my entire family to start discs playing easily and make my collection pretty.

My 400 Disc DVD player is going away.
My AppleTV is DEFINITELY going away.

Thumbs up so far on this one!

 

[dkane360]

I have a dune hd smart h1 and I was waiting for a chance to use it on my main system before writing up a review. But I'm very happy with it too. Took me a little longer to install zappiti because i was stubborn and wasn't reading instructions lol.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I took about three days to get it going, but I was playing with it first on my PC, and getting the hang of it and wanted to get the Dune installed with a hard drive and working... Then I had some cables to make and installed the Dune in my rack and programmed it into my home system before I really was at a point where I was comfortable with things.

I still have to figure out network drives and network storage with it and figure out if I'm going to build a PC for it or if I'm just going to dump some 1TB drives onto my network for it. Since I haven't started putting my Blu-ray collection together on hard drives, I will first need to pick up a BD drive for my PC and do some testing of that so I can see how the Dune does with that.

My biggest complaint is that there is a bit of a startup time lag between browsing and waiting for the movie to start, which I wish was far quicker.

Really, I would pay a couple hundred bucks more, or more, if this stuff could be installed and integrated from the start and if it had the ability to handle everything far more quickly. But, this is still worlds better than my 400 disc player AND my AppleTV. I am building my entire movie collection now, and that process should take about 2-3 months to complete.

 

[dkane360]

Really? I don't get any lag between selecting the movie and it playing. Maybe because I have it on the internal storage. It does take a little bit longer than expected to turn on though, but it's faster than my blu-ray player by far.

I use this drive because I needed an external drive. It works great on my pc and mac side.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I have a lot of testing to continue to do with the unit and will likely be adding drives directly off the unit as well as NAS to it. The current storage includes 2TB internal, which I'm slowly building into a full library. But, the majority of my collection is MP4 movies sitting on a older networked PC, so that is likely the delay between selection and playback.

I'm going to be following up with this post with my personal experiences as I go through them. This will include my typical amount of complaining about the product, as well as the good stuff I come across.

Despite the struggles I had with the setup and the LESS THAN INTUITIVE setup, I have been really impressed with what I am currently using. Really stable use is key to a good product, and between the Dune and Zappiti, I'm stoked.

 

[dkane360]

Yea there isnt much instruction on setting everything up, and whatever there is, it's in a different language lol. I'll make my own thread after I set everything up with my own thoughts on the dune

 

[BMXTRIX]

Just wanted to follow up after I've now had a few weeks of playing with it. I will have more as well as my collection gets ripped to the system.

Zappiti is an absolute must for the Dune. The more I use the Dune itself, the more I realize that they need to partner and LISTEN to a GUI design company and get more software people that can make the setup of functions easier from ground zero. That is, the setup of the Dune is a pain. To do almost ANYTHING related to the setup is a pain. You have to go onto forums, read, ask questions, etc. to get it all setup properly.

That said, beyond the setup, the Dune is a very stable unit and ONCE configured (with Zappiti) it has worked darn near flawlessly.

I've now got about 200 DVDs in the system and just a few Blu-rays. I have a 2TB drive installed in the unit, and I added a Icy Dock 4 drive external (USB 2.0) case directly to the Dune externally. I only have 3 2TB drives installed in the Icy Dock. That is a total of 8TB of storage directly attached to the Dune. I have not yet loaded movies to the drives in the Icy Dock, but I had no issues, at all, installing the Icy Dock or having the Dune recognize the drives. Only took an hour or so to get it completely setup with the external drives and ready to use them, so I will be testing them out this week.

I changed my home network to gigabit this week, but I still need to add some local gigabit switches to see if that helps with overall transfer speeds on my network. I'm hoping it will. Not sure this has any factor on the Dune, but I do have one networked hard drive that I want to test with BDs as this may be an evenutal product which is used in the future and may be ideal for multiple Dune units if someone goes that route.

Playback of DVDs (ISO 1:1 copies) is smooth. For some reason video appears to be a bit dark with blacks getting crushed. I think I can tweak the video settings in the Dune which I have not done yet and need to. While standard 'play' is smooth, scan forward is not as speedy as it should be. Even though they offer multiple steps (2x, 4x, 8x, etc.) it isn't truly that fast. This, I am hoping, they will address in a firmware upgrade to the unit. Rewind is DREADFUL! Their 1x rewind is more like .1x. I'm not sure why they have this hiccup with the player, but it is the most annoying aspect of the player that I've run into so far. Once again, hopefully this will be addressed by a significant firmware upgrade.

The few Blu-rays I've played have been solid for playback. I haven't done much with them yet and haven't sat through a full BD movie directly from the Dune. This will be part of what I follow up on as I get a few more movies into it and sit down and watch them with a critical eye.

The Zappiti interface has continued to be the most exciting part of the product. The cover flow works well and is reasonably responsive. The alphabetical search option does a great job, and updating the database is just a few clicks of effort on a PC. The most time I spend with it is updating titles that may not be found in IMDB accurately.

My favorite part of the Dune (other than Zappiti): The stability. I haven't had it crash at all and it just does what it is supposed to do.

My least favorite part: Their way to technical setup requirements for almost every little thing. Sure, once setup it works, but getting there is a headache.