LG MS450H - Full HD network media player and MPEG-4 tuner from LG
After turning on the device, an LG logo will greet us for the duration of the boot. We will then find ourselves facing the menu, from which we will not access anything by default until we set up the device.
For this reason, you can immediately jump to the last point where you can make settings. Here you can get over all the important settings in about 10 minutes. You can tune your player to your television, set the required resolution, and also if your TV supports 24p mode, which allows you to play movies without slip.
You can also set up network access. The LG player is capable of accessing both wired and wireless networks. The test piece we had when retrieving an IP assignment via DHCP was not yet perfect, but this is largely due to the fact that the final software did not peak on it. Due to this error, we couldn’t even set up the wireless network, but luckily the wired worked great, so we were able to try out the network features.
Don't run so far ahead! The settings also include tuning of TV broadcasts, which can be done manually or automatically. Of course, we chose the latter, and after 1-2 minutes we could already watch the currently available taxes. It’s worth mentioning here that we used an antenna that came with notebooks about 15 inches from the antenna, but the reception was still flawless.
Once everything is set up, all we have to do is try it out. You can watch TV programs under DTV. We had no complaints about the quality of the broadcasts, but that might be natural, too. In digital broadcasts, there is no ghost image, if the signal strength is not enough, the image simply disintegrates and then we get an error message that there is no signal.
If we have internet access, we can also try Youtube videos. You can easily browse through them and watch movies in a window by reading the description next to them, or even displaying them in full screen. Then we can expect that lower resolution movies will not look nice.
We didn’t try Picasa live, as we didn’t have time to create our own photo album because of the quick testing. What we were trying, however, was playing videos with different encodings. In this respect, the device has passed the exams. We tried 1080p and 720p MKV files as well as traditional DivX encoded movies.
Importantly, the player also handled subtitle files packaged in MKV without error. It is true that we were unable to turn off the caption, but we can also attribute this to the test version. All in all, we can say that in many places it has been felt that software is not the final solution yet, but we need to be able to live with it, as this is the way to try a non-final store version.
Of course, we also tried playback over the network, there was no problem with that either. The movies came without a hitch, even though the machine used for the media server was only equipped with a Gs standard wireless interface.
