Product Listing

AVerMedia AVerLife HD Studio - Simple Does It

By Hafeez Sim - 18 Jul 2011

User Interface

Exploring the Interface

AVerMedia has done a decent job with regards to the user interface (UI). It is responsive and very easy to understand. Once you start up the player, you will be brought to the home screen.

Navigating the home screen is made simple by the icon approach, which is quite the norm nowadays for media players. The black background helps to make the icons and menus stand out; and while not as attractive as the WD TV Live Hub’s UI, the HD Studio’s UI is clean and experiences lesser lag during navigation.

Due to its compact size, the HD Studio does not come with a hard drive, nor does it allow you to install one. Thankfully, it has two USB ports for you to connect USB hard drives (formatted in FAT32 or NTFS). We guess that’s the price to pay if you want the smallest media player possible. The HD Studio does allow you to tinker with its display and sound settings, among other things. For example, you can choose to output the video in 720p, 1080i or 1080p/60. And while there is an Info button that displays information about the video file that's currently playing, it is brief and basic - unlike the AC Ryan Playon!HD2, which provides information such as the codec the video is encoded in. The HD Studio also provides some extra options for accessing Internet content, though the options are much less than most of the players we reviewed recently. For instance, the inability to access YouTube is a glaring miss. On the plus side, it does support UPnP, so finding shared media content over the network is a breeze.

We like the clean and simple icon-based UI. The black background really helps to make the icons and text stand out.

If you're looking for Internet content on YouTube, you'll be disappointed. You do get Flickr, Picasa and Internet radio though.

The Settings menu for the player does offer a bit more than what you'd expect from a budget player.

For HD resolution, you can toggle between 720p, 1080i and 1080p60.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
8.0
  • Design 7.5
  • Performance 8
  • Features 7
  • Value 8
The Good
Compact size
Clean and speedy UI
The Bad
Small remote, even smaller buttons
Issue with displaying subtitles
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.