Tuesday 1 March 2016

Zappiti 4K Player


Android-based delivery of your movie and TV files with a beautiful interface and 4K delivery into the bargain. And it does seem a bargain

We are now living in a thoroughly 4K video world — all the top TV ranges from the major players lead with the 4K/Ultra HD resolution of 3840×2060 pixels. Of course there remain some persuasive arguments that the benefits of this quadrupled resolution is minimal on its own, particularly if viewing on 55-inch screens or below (unless you sit really really close). But it’s fast becoming the default — if you decide to stick with 1920x1080, you’ll likely miss out on the latest video processing, internet smarts and connectivity that go into higher-level tellies, because the best models are all now 4K. And with upcoming generations of TV adding High Dynamic Range and other technical benefits to the 4K spec, going Ultra HD is becoming ever more of a no-brainer.


The other question of 4K — where’s the 4K material to watch? — is being answered by the incoming early 4K Blu-ray players. But are physical discs really the answer for a future of streaming and file-based playback? Many think not, and in Europe particularly Blu-ray and DVD sales channels are simply drying up as they react to and then further contribute to a nose-dive in physical disc sales. Thankfully for disc fans here, Australia is currently a notable survival zone for physical media, perhaps because internet streaming speeds remain dismal for so many of us. A practical answer, then, may be 4K file-based playback from a 4K-capable media player. And in that market, Zappiti is a leader.

Equipment


The offering from Zappiti combines physical players and a software playback interface called Zappiti Media Center. The software is also available for OS X and Windows, and indeed you can use it to organise your movie files and TV episodes for playback on your computer without any need for a Zappiti player in your home.

But the players provide the easiest final step to deliver the videos to your shiny 4K television. They provide local hard-drive storage in addition to playing back over your network from computer or NAS drive, all under control of ‘apps’ running on the player.

And there are plenty of apps available, because the Zappiti players use an Android operating system and can download any compatible apps from the Google play store. So while Zappiti’s own pair of playback apps (Media Center for local storage, Explorer for attached drives and network playback) do the day-to-day playback, other apps can provide many other options, including copying your files onto the hard drive.

So far as we could ascertain, there is no full instruction manual for Zappiti players, perhaps inevitable given the fluidity of app markets and firmware changes. So when you get stuck, turn to the internet. Zappiti’s own site and the wealth of info in the ‘zappiti. uservoice.com’ forums should be your first stop, navigating through occasional chunks of French (Zappiti is proudly based in Paris, so the occasional slips in its instructions are in Franglais, not Chinglish).

Don’t panic, however — the whole delight of Zappiti’s products are that they deliver a stunning user interface with the simplest of navigation and a wealth of information gathered automatically online for your files, including cover art, synopses, and (geek delight) full technical information. The quick start guide may be all you need.

There are three sizes of Zappiti player — they all come without any hard drive supplied, so you add your own (or ask a friendly dealer to assist). We became acquainted with the mid-sized unit, called simply the Zappiti 4K Player; it has a single hard-drive bay ready for a 3.5-inch SATA drive up to 8TB of storage, along with three USB slots, one USB 3.0 on the side and the other two USB 2.0 slots on the back, plus a useful side SD/MMC card slot. Back-up procedures for your movie and shows can be accessed through settings or using Android apps.

Zappiti 4K Player

Performance


Setting up was quick and idiot-proof. With the hard drive installed, you connect the Player to your network (preferably by the gigabit-speed Ethernet, given you’ll be streaming video potentially up to 4K bit-rates, but alternatively by Wi-Fi). Then you connect the HDMI to your system, ideally direct to your 4K TV — we were rather spoiled by testing the Zappiti while having in residence the 65-inch model of LG’s Sound+Image award-winning OLED 4K 960T, surely the best TV currently available in Australia.

You can connect the Zappiti to any TV — and it doesn’t have to be 4K, nor does it require an HDMI 2.0 input, because the Zappiti doesn’t have a 2.0 output. The choice to stick with HDMI 1.4 limits the player’s 4K frame rate to 30Hz, and will also preclude the inclusion of HDCP 2.2 copy protection, which may or may not end up being used to protect legitimate 4K content. But HDMI 1.4 is enough for any 4K movie to play at the usual 24Hz (or the actual 23.976Hz, which Zappiti fully supports), and certainly all Blu-ray and 1080p content at any frame-rate, including 3D. Our sample player was a demo unit from Australian distributor Vivid Audio, and came delightfully pre-loaded with several dozen Blu-ray rips as .mt2s/AVCHD files on its two-sector hard drive, along with various TV shows, mainly in avi shells.

It’s easy to add more — indeed you can load it many ways, given the availability of simple Android apps for FTP or file navigation. The simple ES Explorer app lets you copy and paste multiple files from inserted USB sticks or drives to the hard drive with relative ease.

Two remote controls are supplied, one of them an ‘Air’ RF remote for waving around, the other a more conventional IR remote — we didn’t receive the natty RF device but had no difficulties using just the standard remote, other than occasionally needing to switch to an on-screen pointer to navigate certain apps.

The video library is viewed through the main Zappiti Media Server app, which displays a marvellous red curtain background and full artwork and titles (opposite), with each cover leading to all those lovely synopses and tech specs. If the red curtain is a bit too popcorn-movie-house for your liking, there are other ‘skins’ available to change the interface.

We noted when loading new content that the cloud-based delivery of all this clever tagging of your movies and TV show does require reliable identification of your movies through a careful naming convention, so take some time to name all your files “properly” — which could be a bit of work for a large existing collection. The convention bans the use of an underline or special characters in file names, and it discourages subfolders, preferring that you create ‘groups’ — for example the supplied unit had the first six ‘Star Wars’ movies in a group which then displayed as a natty carousel of artwork. It’s worth the preparative work — the results speak for themselves.

And not only is the interface gorgeous, so is the picture quality. We would normally advise leaving the task of 4K upscaling to your 4K display, which knows its own characteristics best, while doing this puts less data through your HDMI pipe. But the Zappiti does offer a few arguments for allowing it this privilege. Firstly it upscales very well — we couldn’t pick a flaw in the Zappiti’s upscaling of the Blu-ray rips, and the results were nothing less than spectacular on the 65-inch OLED screen.  Secondly Zappiti claims to actually improve things via the wonder of Zappiti MagicPixel technology, which seems to claim “improved dynamics, accuracy colorimetry, more contrast, solid deinterlacing and better upscaling”... we might be cynical of a system promising to improve upon purity had we not experienced similar successful systems in the recent past, notably from Darbee, as implemented in recent Oppo Blu-ray players. The Zappiti player doesn’t offer the clever split-screen demonstration of its abilities that Darbee does, so it’s harder to A-B its results, but as we said, no flaws introduced and a spectacular result. Zappiti also notes that the MagicPixel system can even improve delivery to a 1080p display, also that it will downscale 4K content for 1080p displays to great effect.

As for actual 4K content, those few 4K test videos we current have were hit and miss (most are at 50Hz and 60Hz), but the 4K/24Hz trailer of ‘Interstellar’ played beautifully, the closing shot of stars in space revealing both the accuracy of the Zappiti’s delivery and the OLED’s merits of pinpoint pixel-level contrast. The Zappiti is able to handle HEVC and H.265 compression as well as H.264, and is happy with a wide range of common filetypes and containers from .mkv and mp4 to .ts streams and .avis. We note it can also handle high-res audio up to 24-bit/192kHz.

We were also delighted by its rare ability to play full DVD rips from Video_TS folders, even over a network, using the Zappiti Explorer app, which the Zappiti uses for playback over your home network or from attached USB drives, sticks or SD cards.

Sonically also, the Zappiti more than holds its own — it will deliver even Dolby Atmos soundtracks, plus Dolby TrueHD, DTS, DTS-HD, Dolby Digital and DTS. You can access the audio bitstream from the HDMI output or the optical digital output, or just use the analogue audio outputs.

The most surprising socket on the Zappiti player is an HDMI input, which could well be a useful spare for chaining in an extra HDMI source (even the $7999 OLED LG TV offers a mean three HDMI inputs). You’d expect the Zappiti to just forward this input through to the output, but in fact it will process and output the signal according to its current video output settings, so you might experiment to see what effect the MagicPixel technology can have on your other video sources. We could not, sadly, find any way to persuade the Zappiti to record from HDMI, even using the resources of Android apps!

We might wish for easier access to those video output settings — there are very limited pop-up settings for making changes on the fly, so that for most you have to stop the movie, make changes and return. The Zappiti will auto-sense and switch to 24Hz, but it will change other frame rates to whatever you’ve selected, and being judderphobic that left us needing to switch regularly between 50Hz and 60Hz, depending on the file being played. This also precludes leaving the Zappiti upscaling everything to 4K, since 50/60Hz material will be stripped and/or pulled down to 30Hz or below. (A ‘native’ output setting would therefore be handy, just showing it like it is. There is an ‘auto’ setting, but this simply fixes output at whatever your display boasts via EDID to be its best.)

Conclusion


That small video output issue and HDMI 1.4 silicon limitations aside, and remembering you have to bring your own hard drive, the Zappiti 4K Player proved technically proficient, easy to set up, and a delight to operate thanks to that wonderful interface with its cloud-sourced cleverness — it can make navigation of your movie collection as beautiful and easy as systems that are way WAY more expensive. The whole Zappiti family should be closely considered by anyone looking to deliver a file-based video collection to their shiny new 4K television. Jez Ford

SPECS
Processor: Realtek RTD1195
Cache: 512kb L2
Internal flash memory: 5GB
Inputs: 1 x HDMI 1.4 CEC, 2 x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, SD/MMC card reader, network
Outputs: HDMI 1.4 CEC; minijack analogue audio, optical digital audio
Storage: SATA 3.5-inch, HDD not included
Networking: gigabit Ethernet; Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n; DLNA 1.5/2.0, SMB
Video codecs: HEVC, H.265, MVC, AVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, XVID, DIVX, WMV9, FLV, VC-1, H.264/x.264, CVD 1.0/2.0, SVCD, AVS, Sorenson Spark L70, VP8; bitrates up to 120Mbit/s
Video file formats: BD ISO, BDMV, MKV, MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS, M2TS, VOB, AVI, MOV, MP4, QT, WMV, DVD-ISO, VIDEO_TS, AVCHD 2.0 (inc 3D)
Video output: from SD to 1080p/60, UHD (3840x2160p) up to 30p; 4K (4096x2160) 24p only
Audio codecs: AC3, DTS, MPEG, AAC, LPCM, ALAC, AIFF, WAV, VSELP, FLAC, Ogg, lossless to 24-bit/192kHz
Multichannel audio: DTS, DTS-HD, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos - bitstream (RAW)/2.0 downmix
Included: IR remote control, 2.4G air mouse, HDMI cable, AV cable
Dimensions (whd): 281 x 188 x 50mm
Weight: 1.3kg
Warranty: Two years