My son is partial to renting movies and since my Netflix queue is tied up with movies that don’t suck, he rents his from the library. That means he’ll occasionally come home with something a bit ancient. Enter The Three Caballeros, the 1942 Disney classic. Full of inappropriate humor, racial stereotypes, and an extremely lecherous Donald Duck the movie can only be forgiven because of its age. When my son wanted to watch the movie, I popped it in my other HTPC which said it was unplayable. It gave me a number of odd messages all adding up to “I’m not going to play this disc.” I remembered that Sergio at VidaBox bragged that his box was optimized to play any disc. Any? I turned around and inserted it into the VidaBox Slim. Played it no problem. So, I started thinking about all my other “problem” discs. Dual Discs, DTS CDs, Turkish children’s Video CD… One after the other I placed them into the VidaBox Slim. Dishwalla – Live…Greetings From the Flow State (DualDisc), David Gray – Life in Slow Motion (DualDisc), Diana Krall - Love Scenes (DTS), Yavru Hayvanlar Ciftlikte (a Turkish children’s VCD – translates as Baby Animals on the Farm)… One after another they played without fault.

One thing that many people are curious about is the ability of ripping movies to the hard drive. Yes, this is possible. Once again, because of the laws, VidaBox is not allowed to load up the single program you’ll need to utilize that function. Technically, it is illegal to break the encryption on a movie and save it to your hard drive even if you own it. What VidaBox has done is configured each of their Media Center Systems so that with the addition of one program you can rip AnyDVD to your hard drive. They included what looks to be a few discs to your hard drive for you so that you can see if this functionality is something you’d like to pursue. If you hit Play on any of these “burned” titles, the machine will ask you to insert the DVD (which they have provided for you). Understand that DVD’s take up a lot of hard disc space. With a 500 gig hard drive, you’ll only be able to store about 75 movies before running out of space. As a massive movie archive option, storage costs just haven’t come down enough. You will probably only want to store a couple of dozen of movies at the most if you want to leave enough room for your music and TV recording.

Music

VidaBox takes the extra step by bumping up the default music storage option to the highest quality MP3 (320kbps) rather than leaving it at the unit’s default compressed wma (128kbps). I asked why they didn’t go all the way to WMA lossless and they replied that they wanted to make sure that their boxes used the highest quality encoding that would also be compatible with all MP3 players. I guess I can understand that. The four USB ports on the front make quickly hooking up and downloading music to your MP3 player a snap. They also switch the storage options from My Music (which is located within the operating system) to the D partition. This means that in the event that the operating system needs to be reinstalled, you won’t lose any of your music. Other than that, there really isn’t much to say about the VidaBox over any other MCE based server.

Note from VidaBox
Vidabox is one of the manufacturers that has auto sample rate switching. Basically, most Media Centers set the sampling rate to 48kHz so that DD and DTS movies get passed through to the receiver and be decoded there properly. But without autoswitching, music (44kHz) also gets upsampled to 48kHz with a deterioration in quality.  DTS music (encoded at 44kHz) also gets upsampled and is thus unplayable resulting in static. Users would have to go into the sound card driver setup and manual change the sampling rate as needed. This is not needed with a VidaBox system. The sampling rate changes automatically depending on what is being played back. No user interaction.

Customer Service

Customer service can make or break your experience. One may wonder why it is that I was chosen as the one to review media servers. Honestly, I’ve had more problems with bad units, bad shipping, and odd problems that most of the other Audioholics reviewers combined. This makes me the perfect candidate for testing servers of all kinds. If it works for me, it’ll work for most anyone. I don’t know how many emails/conversations I’ve had over the last year that contain the line, “I am surprised that you are having this problem” or “We’ve never heard of anyone having this problem before.” As such, I’m in a unique position to comment on the customer service of most of the manufacturers of the products I review. Now you may argue that as a reviewer I get preferential treatment. Maybe. But I still get to interact with the techies and CSRs. VidaBox customer service is, in my experience, at least as good if not better than any I’ve encountered. Sure, they have a forum and are very responsive to email, but they also have a system for logging onto your server and controlling it remotely.

Ack! Big Brother! Run away… Run away! Now don’t go all Orwellian on me. The only way they can log onto your server is with your permission. The code to access your server is sent with the unit and is NOT kept on file at VidaBox. Even if it was, a pop-up appears on your screen that tells you that someone is logged on to your server and lets you kick them off with a click. What is nice about this system is that they can actually work on your problem from afar. You can watch if you want or make yourself a sandwich. Sometimes talking a problem through on the phone is just not enough. They can fix something is a matter of minutes that might take much longer over the phone. Personally, I really like that they have this ability. Also customers can change the default password if they please to something that they want. They can provide the new password to VidaBox if remote assistance is needed. Alternatively, remote assistance can be disabled by the user if they don't want it at all but then VidaBox won't be able to provide remote support.

Issues

On the Standard Slim I was testing, the DVI out had a bit of a bug. If you connected via DVI on the initial startup, the unit would put out no sound. The workaround is to connect via any other connection (composite, s-video, component, VGA) and then switch to DVI. If you follow the above hotswap instructions, this is a fairly painless process. Once you do, the unit can be powered down, restarted, or whatever and the DVI and audio will still work. VidaBox has said that on units that are shipping now, this problem has been fixed.

Overall, I felt the interface on the VidaBox Slim was a little slower than what I was used to with other Media Centers I’ve used I would never, ever, classify the MCE interface as speedy by any definition of the word on any machine. But I did find myself waiting more than I was used too. Getting into the My Movies section was especially tedious. I found that a restart would temporarily increase the speed of the enus but eventually it would slow back down.

One aspect of the VidaBox Slim that I really took issue with is that it doesn’t have any Last State memory. Here in Florida, we’ve been know to have a power fluctuation or two. If the power cuts out, the VidaBox Slim will not remember that it was on and will simply stay off. I find this to be unacceptable. The reason I’m recording something is that I want to watch it later. If the power hiccups, I’d rather miss five minutes in the middle of the show rather than the entire show. Some of the chipsets that VidaBox uses for their Media Center Systems can be configured to remember the last state of the machine. When you order yours, you may want to request that the unit be configured to remember the last state. If it is possible, they will configure it that way for you.

I’ve mentioned the lack of an IR receiver in the box before, but it bears repeating. If you are going to use the supplied remote, you’ll need to install the IR receiver. Personally, I’m using my Universal Remote Control TX-1000 Medius remote. What I’ve done is connect the IR mitter from the MRF-200 base station to the front of the VidaBox Slim’s IR receiver. This way I can control the unit, take advantage of the RF keyboard, and hide the IR receiver behind the unit in the entertainment center for a cleaner look. If you are actually going to use the IR receiver as intended, you’ll need some sort of line of sight. Consider tucking it along side the unit rather than on top where it will stick out. Regardless, the IR receiver will flash a red light each time you press a button on the remote so you will notice it.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this review for you. We had some problems getting a working unit for review. It seemed that the stars had aligned against VidaBox. That is why I reviewed both the Original and the Standard configurations – when I started the review, the Standard wasn’t released yet! I could take you through the whole process but the short version is that not all the issues were because of shipping or external factors and not all the issues were faults of VidaBox. What is important is that these issues were resolved quickly and atisfactorily. While I don’t expect that anyone else will go through what I went through, I feel confident that VidaBox is committed to their product and brand.

Conclusion

So, how do I feel about the VidaBox Slim overall? Well, I love that its small size blends in so well with the rest of my components. It doesn’t look like a tipped over computer which is a big plus for me. Once I got a working model, it took nearly everything I could throw at it in stride with only minor hiccups. It performed admirably on the HQV tests and the interplay between the different cards and components worked fairly seamlessly. It is still a PC and it still does stuff occasionally to remind you of that. But as media centers go, this one is pretty great. The Karaoke is fun at parties and the RAID 5 storage is fantastic edition. While IY’ers are going to balk at any media center that is sold for *gasp* profit, for the rest of us, the VidaBox Slim offers a sleek, elegant, and most of all stable solution. Media Centers may not have moved out of the office for many, but the Slim and its low-profile DVD looks, makes great strides towards the home theater.