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Antec Veris Multimedia Station E-Z
Lights, Camera, Action!
Once you've gotten the setup out of the way, playback on the Antec Veris Multimedia Station E-Z is as simple as highlighting the file you want and pressing Enter. When you do, you're presented with something like this:
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Fast-forwarded to the interesting bits |
The vertical navigation metaphor carries through here, with Next and Previous being situated below and above the current file's information, respectively. This maps directly on to the controls: pressing cursor down will skip forward to the next file or chapter, while pressing up will skip to the previous one in the list. Holding either of these buttons will seek back or forward through the file, jumping through it in intervals of a few seconds. Here is where the compact remote begins to show its limitations: by mapping skip and seek to the same pair of buttons, they have made it very easy to accidentally skip to the next file when you only meant to jump ahead a few seconds. Clicking on the seek bar with your mouse will allow you to jump directly to any part of the file, but it's disappointing that this functionality is not present in the remote interface.
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An example of soft subtitles in iMedian HD |
Playback of video files is smooth and seamless, with iMedian gracefully handling just about any kind of video file you can throw at it, including flash videos. For formats that support it, iMedian can also display so-called soft-subtitles. Unlike DVD subtitles, which are actual images, soft-subtitles are a series of text strings embedded in the file with time indices to tell the program when each line should appear and disappear. Many media player programs refuse to handle these at all. iMedian will cheerfully read these soft subtitles and display them onscreen with the video, though style and position data for the lines is ignored.
Rockin' out |
Music playback is handled similarly to video, except that the interface does not fade away after a few seconds. Instead, the default background is displayed, along with a spectrum meter and any album art. Title info is displayed along with album and artist, but again the truncation issue rears its ugly head, as you can see in the example. The song title scrolls to display the whole thing, but the artist and album fields remain static. Not a huge issue, but be prepared to field a lot "A Tribute To the who?" sort of questions if you use this to play music in parties.
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Pictures slideshow |
Navigating through your pictures library works just like the other two. Opening any image begins a slideshow of that folder's contents, beginning with the picture you selected. Images are automatically scaled to fit the screen without distortion. Upsizing small images produces pixelated images, as usual, but iMedian does not introduce any extra noise into the image in doing so.
A note on playlists here: By default, iMedian treats every folder like a playlist, going through every file in ASCIIbetical order, then looping around again to the start. It will cheerfully accept pre-made .pls or .m3u playlists, but making new ones on the spot can be a bit of an ordeal.