HDI Dune BD Prime 3.0

The HDI Dune BD Prime 3.0 is a multimedia centre with an integrated Blu-ray player. In fact, it's probably one of the main competitors of the PopcornHour C-200, another hybrid model. Will the Dune have what it takes to outdo the five-star PCH? Read on to find out.

Hardware: an interface with great potential

The BD Prime looks more like a Blu-ray player than a media centre. The main body of the device is made from metal and the front panel is plastic. On the whole, the finish is pretty average and it feels like an entry-level product to handle. It's certainly a far cry from the solid finish of the PCH C-200. The basic model isn't supplied with a hard drive, but it can be easily equipped with a 2.5" SATA hard drive. Note that 3.5" models, primarily designed for desktop computers, aren't compatible.


Unlike the PCH C-200, the Blu-ray player is directly integrated into the device and doesn't disfigure the front of the media centre. The front panel features a small VFD screen that's more or less useless as it's not possible to navigate through internal menus without having the TV switched on. The screen won't even display the name of your folders and files. Finally, the remote control also has a bit of a tacky look and feel to it, but it's practical and easy enough to use.


The basic user interface isn't great, but can quickly be made a lot better for anyone who's willing to get stuck in themselves. The default interface is meagre to say the least. Although the menus certainly get the best out of Full-HD resolution, there are very few available options. Album covers aren't displayed, track information is displayed but with a very basic layout and it's not possible to display all the photos in an album as thumbnails.

More options are available for films. Like many networked media tanks (Popcorn Hour etc.), you have to use third-party applications to create a video jukebox. One of the most widely used applications is called 'My Movies'. The basic version of the application is free and automatically retrieves all kinds of information about your films (DVD cover, plot summary, rating etc.) and arranges it all to make one page per film (see below). Plus, once it's all set up, you'll be able to browse through your films by displaying a page full of DVD covers.


Skins and themes are not as good as those available for YAMJ and networked media tanks. Plus, if you need a hand setting it up or using third-party applications, there are only a few specialist forums of HDI users out there as the community is much smaller than that of PopcornHour users.
Multimedia decoding is taken care of by a Sigma Designs SMP8642 chip. This is pretty much the same chip used in the PopcornHour C-200 (a 8643) with Macrovision compatibility being the only real difference. This makes ensures compatibility with pretty much all of the latest video formats and it has no problem with HD streaming. A particularly good feature is automatic detection of the film's frequency (24p, 23.976 etc.). Audio formats are well handled with support for file types like MP3, M4A, FLAC and more, although there's no OGG compatibility. Dolby Digital and DTS are well handled and can be bitstreamed (sent to an audio amplifier via HDMI or SPDIF) and can be downmixed to stereo. This means a multi-channel track can be processed and sent to stereo speakers that aren't compatible with DTS (typically TV speakers). Another great and not-often seen feature is the ability to move soundtracks backwards or forwards in time.

As you can see in our media centre face-off, external subtitles aren't very well handled, even if they can be moved backwards or forwards in time like audio tracks. Photos aren't handled amazingly either. They're very slow to display, and waiting four to five seconds is really annoying when you want to flick through an album. However, if you stay viewing a given photo for a while, the next one starts loading in the background and will display almost instantly when you decide to move on.


Connections: HDMI etc. and optional Wi-Fi

There's a good range of connections with classics like HDMI, component, composite, optical and coaxial. You'll also find an RCA connection for hooking up a 7.1 sound system, thus by-passing the need for a decoder. There are USB Host ports (including one on the side) for access to content on USB flash drives and external hard drives. You can even copy files from external peripherals onto the media centre's hard drive with a transfer speed of approximately 15 MBps.

You can connect the Dune BD Prime 3.0 to a network via the Gigabit Ethernet port. However, for the moment, the network speed is limited to 100 Mbps with a data transfer rate of 7.9 MBps. The NAS function is great for transferring files from a computer to the media centre hard drive. You can even play files stored on a computer directly via UPnP or SMB/NFS, and it's good to see a BitTorrent client in there too. Wi-Fi connectivity is an optional extra and requires a USB dongle. Nevertheless, the presence of an empty internal enclosure makes me wonder whether an MII module could be coming at a later date.