Dueple 350D Hi-def Media Player
The Dueple 350D is a stand-alone media player, that is, it has a slot loading
DVD drive as standard and the ability to install a standard 3.5" hard disk internally.
You can even plug in standard USB memory sticks or USB disk enclosures and play
back content from them.
In addition, the unit has a 10/100 Ethernet port, so it can be connected to virtually
any standard network - even via a wireless router (though I wouldn't reccomend trying
to play HD content [or even moderately high bitrate SD content!] over a wireless link).
On to the good stuff..
Detailed Specifications:
Taken from the box of the player itself, it claims to have the following features:
Visual: Formats - WMV, AVI, MPG, VOB, MP4, ASF, TP, TRP, TS
Visual: Codecs - MPEG-1, 2 & 4, Xvid, DivX, Windows Media Video
Visual: Resolution - Up to 1920x1080i ?
Audio: MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg, PCM, WAV
Audio: Multi-channel audio to 2-channel down mixing
Image: JPEG
Connectivity: 10/100 Ethernet (standard RJ45 connector)
Connectivity: USB 2.0 Host 2 Ports
Connectivity: USB 2.0 Slave 1 Port
Video Output: DVI, Component, S-Video, Composite
Audio Output: Digital over co-axial or optical
Audio Output: Analogue over 2-channel phono connectors
Sub Titles: SMI, SMIL, SRT
File System: FAT(32), NTFS
As you can see from the specifications, the device has support for pretty much anything you need. In
addition I have found that it will also play back CD and DVD iso images; so you can archive your discs to
single files and keep things much neater.
Downmixing; the device automatically downmixes 5.1 content to 2-channel analogue if
(like me!) you do not have a digital amplifier. This applies to both Dolby 5.1 content from DVD sources
and to other media using AC3 or similar audio tracks.
Networking Configuration:
The device does not require any software to be installed on your PC as it uses the
native Windows File and Print Sharing protocol. A lot of devices seem to require custom
software to be installed to manage audio and video libraries, so this simple approach is
very welcome by me!
To attach the player to a networked PC or Server, you will need to add the IP address of the PC
in the configuration menu of the Dueple - I repeat, add the IP address of the PC to the player, NOT
your router IP address, NOT the IP address assigned by your ISP. It seems obvious, but a lot of
people don't seem to understand this part!
The player needs a share called 'dueple' to be made available from the PC side, so you'll want
to right click on the folder where your media files are stored and 'share' it, making sure that you
call it 'dueple'.
The player connects to the share as an unprivileged user (there are no user or password settings on
the device) so make sure that the folder structure is not restricted to specific users or accounts.
If you are lucky enough to be running a Unix based operating system, then you'll need to install Samba.
My configuration for the dueple service is shown below, modify to suit your own needs:
[dueple]
path = /export/entertainment
follow symlinks = yes
browseable = yes
create mask = 0755
directory mask = 0755
writeable = no
guest ok = yes
You'll also need to 'chmod o+rx' the directory structure to allow all users to access the files.
Remember to add a 'nobody' user via 'smbpasswd' - there isn't one by default.
A typical access from the Dueple in your samba log should show up as below:
[2007/01/09 21:46:05, 1] smbd/service.c:make_connection_snum(642)
lockontech-86xx (192.168.1.101) connect to service dueple initially as user nobody (uid=65534, gid=65534) (pid 8626)
Firmware Updates:
The device has had a number of updates through it's lifetime, a number of which have added
some major feature improvements. I have a number of them available if anyone needs a particular version:
Firmware 1.06
First update for the English language firmware.
Firmware 1.08
New features in 1.08 version
1) Debugging of video file play without subtitle
2) Display of audio/ subtitle in language
3) Debugging of DVD screen ratio
4) Support selection of video files in play list
5) Support UDF file format in DVD/CD (For the files over 2GB, UDF has to be
used.)
6) Upgraded compatibility with external memory
7) Upgraded compatibility with 120fps AVI file
8) Support M3U play list
Firmware 1.10
New features in 1.10 version
Added correct CSS firmware to increase compatability with commercial DVDs.
Firmware 1.12
Sorry, no info on this one.
Firmware 1.15
Final firmware version. Sorry no info on this one.
Update Procedure
To update your device, you will need to either install an internal disk drive and copy the unzipped
file to 'update.bin' in the root directory, or easier, put 'update.bin' on a USB memory stick and upgrade
from there. The upgrade option is in the configuration menu and it should detect the version of 'update.bin'
before you install it (so you can make sure which version you are installing).
Supported Media:
It's a remarkable little player and will happily playback almost everything you throw at it, with a few exceptions.
The chip the player is based on has no support for the following popular media container formats:
OGM (Ogg Movie), MKV (Matroska), Flash or Quicktime
There is also no support for MPEG4 video that is encoded as H264. Players supporting this format have
only just started appearing on the market in any decent numbers.
AVI/MPEG4/DivX/Xvid
The device will play back almost all MPEG4 compressed content, right up to 1080p resolution HD content,
but there are some things to watch out for.
The advanced encoding options 'GMC' (global motion compensation) and 'QPel' (quarter pixel) will almost always cause
problems with any hardware based media player (they are extremely CPU intensive).
If you're encoding content yourself, then you'll know whether you're
setting these options or not, however if you are getting media from elsewhere then you can use the nifty
Gspot (www.headbands.com/gspot) tool to scan your file and
detect whether those options are set. You can try to play the file if they are setup, but depending on the complexity, bitrate
and resolution of the video in question, you will probably find the playback unacceptable.
Converting to a useable format
If you get media in a non-supported format, then you can always re-encode it to a useable format. I'm a fan of the command line
tools 'mencoder' and 'ffmpeg'; they support virtually every codec and container format known to man!
You can find pre-compiled versions of mencoder optimized for different CPU types
here (ffdshow.faireal.net), but of course the source code is freely available
from the MPlayer (www.mplayerhq.hu) web site.
If you are intending building mencoder yourself, then make sure you use the latest version of the xvid library - it is now threaded and I have seen
gains of 10-15fps in encoding speed when using the optimized mencoder binaries, compared to other versions which still link against
the older stable version of the xvid library.
A lot of MPEG-4 HD content is now encoded as H264 inside a Matroska container; just about the worst format for
a hardware media player! With a lot of testing an experimentation I came up with a simple script that calls mencoder to convert these videos into
high quality AVI files encoded in the widely supported Xvid MPEG-4 format. Cut and paste this text into a file called "mencode2pass", making sure you put the correct paths in!
#!/bin/bash
VAR1=$1
VAR2=$2
VAR3=$3
ENCODER=/path/to/mencoder.exe
echo "Input <$VAR1>"
echo "Output <$VAR2>"
echo "Bitrate/Size <$VAR3>"
$ENCODER $1 \
-font /path/to/mplayer/subfont.ttf \
-oac copy \
-ovc xvid \
-xvidencopts \
pass=1:turbo:threads=4:bitrate=$3:hq_ac:max_bframes=2:bvhq=1
:me_quality=6:vhq=4:quant_type=mpeg:hq_ac:psnr:\
nointerlacing:trellis:nogmc:noqpel \
-o $2.pass1
$ENCODER $2.pass1 \
-font /path/to/mplayer/subfont.ttf \
-oac copy \
-ovc xvid \
-xvidencopts \
pass=2:threads=4:bitrate=$3:hq_ac:max_bframes=2:bvhq=1
:me_quality=6:vhq=4:quant_type=mpeg:hq_ac:psnr:nointerlacing:\
trellis:nogmc:noqpel \
-o $2
Command line use is:
mencode2pass unsupportedfile outputfile bitrate
Where bitrate can be an actual desired bitrate, or specified as a negative value to give a desired maximum file size in kilobytes. For an hour of HD
content which may be 1050MB in MKV/H264 format I would generally allow a little more, perhaps 1200MB, for the same level of quality in Xvid. e.g.
mencode2pass hd_video.mkv hd_video.avi -1250000
You can then do things like convert an entire directory full of HD content into a new format by wrapping this script in something like this "doall" function:
#!/bin/bash
#$1 = file extension to process
ls *.$1 >/tmp/doall.tmp
echo "Will attempt to process the following files..."
cat /tmp/doall.tmp
echo "..."
sleep 10
cat /tmp/doall.tmp | while read FNAME
do
/path/to/mencode2pass $FNAME $FNAME.avi -1250000
done
And then running doall mkv
There will always be some quality loss when converting between formats, but with these settings I can hardly tell. The output of 720p resolution Xvid
video on my HD LCD tv with the Dueple is very, very good.
As an indication of how long HD content takes to convert, on a pair of Athlon MP 2600 processors the encoding speed is around 5-10fps, so it
will take between 2.5 and 5 times real time to convert the file. The mencode2pass script passes over the file twice for maximum quality, so a 45 minute HD
video may take 4 hours or more to convert.
On a more modern Core 2 Quad, if you use a threaded version of xvid, then the encoding is usually a little faster than realtime, 25-28fps, so around 70 minutes
for a full two pass conversion process.
Miscellaneous Issues:
A few things to look out for:
It may be my HD LCD television, but when I use the DVI output (at 1280x720p) the picture is offset slightly and I need to use
the scroll and zoom features on the remote to re-centre the image. This does not appear to be an issue when
using component output.
Brightness, contrast and saturation values do not seem to stick - if the device is powered down then you'll need
to reset them; it's trivial to do, but an annoyance none the less.
This page updated: 3/Feb/2007