Dec 062011
Micca Speck 1080p Full-HD Ultra Portable Digital Media Player For USB Drives and SD/SDHC Cards
- Powerful 1080p Video Player: MKV, AVI, MP4, MOV, WMV, XVID, TS, M2TS, RM, RMVB, DAT, MPG, MPEG, VOB
- Wide Range Video Codec Support: H.264/AVC, VC-1, MPEG1/2/4, DivX/Xvid, Real Video
- Audio Format Support: MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, APE, AAC
- Ultra portable compact design: only 3″ x 2.3″ x 0.6″
- Supports USB Drives, USB Hard Drives, SD/SDHC Flash Memory Cards, MBR FAT32 and NTFS file systems, up to 2TB
The Micca Speck provides convenient playback of all popular photo, music, and video formats up to 1080p Full-HD resolution on any TV or HDTV! It has a 1080p HDMI output for sending sharp and clear video and audio in pure digital format to HDTVs, as well as composite AV output for use with analog TVs. Its compact and ultra portable design fits anywhere you want it to!
Convenience
Small and sleek, the Micca Speck is a perfect entertainment source for vacations and business trips. Its
List Price: $ 69.95
Price: $ 39.95
A Real Treat – Full Review,
As an avid consumer of technology and gadgets, I like trying newly released products. Some products such as modern smartphones are ostensible technical marvels. Others, like the Micca Speck in this review, are unassuming but warrant a closer look to see how well they perform. I’ve owned several different digital media players, built HTPCs with XBMC, and setup UPnP servers, so this product is familiar territory to me.
This is a very small media player, narrower and only slightly thicker than a pad of post-it sticky notes, and about as heavy. The case is made of matte black aluminum with plastic end caps. The front of the player contains a USB jack and a SD card reader slot, and the back holds the power jack, HDMI, and a 3.5mm AV jack. In all, the Speck is a simple looking player with just the essentials.
I used the Speck with my secondary TV, a 42-inch Panasonic 1080p plasma HDTV. An HDMI cable is not included with the player so I had to use my own. After plugging in the power, the main menu came up quickly after a delay of about 2 seconds, which is practically instant since modern TVs take longer than that to turn on. The default video output is 720p but the player can be set to remember to use 1080p instead. Speaking of settings, there are just a few of them in the player’s setup menu for configuring the player’s video, audio, and general behavior. While some may wish for more settings, I felt that the Speck’s simplified configuration is ideal for its targeted casual users.
The player’s menu system is reasonably intuitive and straightforward to use. Anyone who can browse for files and folders should feel immediately comfortable with it as I was. After selecting a media type from the main menu, the user can then go find what they want to play from an attached USB drive. Only media files of the selected type will be shown, so for example if you have a movie, its cover art JPG, the sound track MP3s, and a couple of subtitle files in the same folder, only the movie file will be listed, making it easier to find and play. In summary, the Speck’s interface is a bit sparse, but is simple to use and is responsive without any perceived lag.
The Speck supports both USB and SD cards. I tried a variety of older USB thumb drives, SD cards of various sizes, as well as a recently purchased 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive. I did not encounter any issues with the drives. According to the manual, drives up to 2TB can be used. This means I can literally have my entire media library on a portable hard drive and play it using the Speck.
The biggest question for any digital media player is how well it plays videos. I don’t have every single video format claimed to be supported by the Speck in my media collection, but I ran through all of the most popular formats such as MKV, MP4, AVI, MOV, ranging from standard definition TV shows to 1080p full movies. The player exhibited no issues with MKV, including newer files with compressed headers. Both internal and external subtitles were supported. The largest MKV file I tried was about 20GB, which played with no visible skips, freezes, lags, or dropped frames. All surround sound formats were supported but output was stereo only. Support for MP4 and AVI files was also good, though these were mostly older files with legacy codecs. I tried a few full BD ISO files and to my surprise they played, but with severe frame dropping at 1080p. Lowering the player’s output to 720p made the BD ISOs play smoothly. This is the equivalent of using a knife to chop firewood, so I don’t fault the Speck for not playing BD ISOs smoothly at 1080p.
Visually, the video playback has all of the sharpness of 1080p, with excellent colors that are accurate and well saturated. The screen shots provided in the manufacturer’s product photos accurately portray this so take a look at those if you wonder what the image quality will be like. Some of the dark scenes show gradient bands, but I’ve seen this in more expensive players as well. I don’t know if the video compression itself is more to blame, than the player’s decoder. In consideration of its low price, however, the Speck’s video output can only be described as spectacular (no pun intended).
Apart from playing videos, the Speck also plays music and photo slideshows. I gave a cursory try-out of these features and found them to be acceptable given that the player’s primary purpose is to play videos. Lack of features such as play lists or random shuffling the entire music library limits the usefulness of these secondary capabilities.
Taking in the Micca Speck as a whole, what it does very well is delivering the type of “it just works” usage experience to casual users. It provides the convenience of being simple to use, while packing surprisingly powerful video playback hardware. The simplified interface with limited settings encourages even advanced users to just sit back and enjoy the…
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Better Than Expected,
I was skeptical at first, but after an hour of throwing everything at it, I must say this is quite an amazing piece of equipment for the price. I bought this as a replacement for a media center notebook that could hardly handle SD content playback. So far all types of files I’ve tested have played back perfectly.
The description doesn’t state it but it also handles AC3 and DTS audio playback. Also the case is aluminum and not plastic. Huge pluses in my opinion.
The only negative is an HDMI cable is not included, but for the product price a quick trip to the store for a cheap cable wasn’t a problem.
Overall one of the best purchases I’ve made so far. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a media player that will play almost everything below full Bluray.
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A Great Introductory Player for the Media Enthusiast,
The Micca Speck is the newest in Micca’s line of low end, inexpensive media players designed for local use without a network. It is a very good player, but like most of micca’s products, a few features needed to really satisfy me are missing. They are rarely mentioned in reviews, and are probably not important to the general public, but they are important to me when deciding to buy a player, so I will mention them below.
To start off, the Micca Speck is an excellent introductory media player with a small footprint and excellent features, and will probably play anything you throw at it that has been encoded using any of the recent standards. Encode in xvid, divx, or h264 with aac or ac3 audio and you should never have any problems, so long as the encoding standards are reasonable. Subtitle support is decent and will work in all cases where the file and the subtitle are separate. Its usb port is sufficient even for USB 3.0 Drives and it has excellent error recovery. After a freeze, it will generally reboot to the main menu after 10-20 seconds. It features a random playback feature that was missing from other players I have tested, and the main reason I bought this player.
In short, if the bulk of your content hails from the last few years, and you want a media player with good features, a reasonably convenient remote, then get this player. It is inexpensive and worth the price. I paid about $5 less than the current listing as of this date, but what you get is much better than anything that was available last year, for a little more cost.
This is all you need to know from this review.
For those who are a bit more particular about their needs, I will elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of this player below. As well as the result of some of my tests on actual media, which you may find useful.
As stated, my main reason for buying this player was the addition of the random playback function. This feature may or may not be available on the other micca players, depending on whether the feature has been added to the latest firmware release.
Since most of my content is old, the random playback is great for revisiting old content when you are not on a viewing schedule, or you want to entertain young kids and they’re not sure what they want to see. The downside, (I am disappointed) is that the feature can only be applied to files in the same subdirectory. You can’t start playing at the root and have it bounce all over the place. This might be great for those who keep secret videos, but I have everything organized by genre. The file system is great, in that it shows the entire file name, and scrolls if the filename is too long.
I had a few files that did not work. One set of files (avi) gave “cannot play file” errors, I am not sure of their codec. Media encoded with ogg generally had problems switching audio streams, with loud clicks and snaps at worst, or a freeze at best. Sometimes it worked great, sometimes it didn’t. I had one file the player recognized as being encoded at 0 khz but it worked fine. My guess is variable bitrate ogg audio will not work well in a movie.
Ogg is an old format that was around before matroska/mkv became the popular container. It was generally used in ogm files, which was great because it allowed multiple streams (pre mkv). I have not bothered to reencode these files and probably will not do so, but if you have old files with ogg or divx 3.1 or anything like that, by now some of these files may have trouble even playing on your pc properly. If your collection is old, and you are not a netflix junkie, then you may want to go with another player, which will likely still give some problems on some of those files. Even vlc does not support some of these older codecs anymore. But I digress.
Only one of the files I tested was overwhelming to the player, but considering only my higher end desktop can play it without slowdown, this is not a strike against the player. I tested a few files, even with quad audio (rare), and as long as the audio was ac3 or aac, there were zero problems with syncing, switching, or anything. It does jump back to the previous keyframe when you switch, so you might end up rewatching the last few seconds of a scene. Neither a plus or minus, it might be interesting to compare what’s said in each stream. I always encode all available streams even if I don’t know the language.
The player automatically adjusts to hdmi by default if you have it connected, and you can switch between av and hdmi via the remote easily. Older models required you to make the switch half blind. It wasn’t difficult, but for the non techie, it could have posed a challenge.
You can enable autoplay for movies, photos, or music. I don’t personally use this feature as you may have problems if there is a lot of content to scan or if some of your files are corrupted, as even the…
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