ICY BOX IB-MP304S-B

The Icy Box IB-MP304S-B is an entry-level model with a modest spec. Is low pricing, an HDMI out and a single USB port enough to justify its existence?

This one's a real black box with a glossy front! There's no control screen, making use without the TV impossible, a shame if all you want to do is use the box to listen to music. It comes with an average sized remote that sits nicely in the hand. The buttons are nice to the touch and navigation simple.

The menus however look quite out of date and haven't been properly designed for the space on an HD screen. You can't display the images in a folder in the form of thumbnails. Energy consumption is good when in use, swinging between 15 and 20 watts. Standby consumption is 2.3 watts, which is average for this type of device.


Decoding: SD video only

Multimedia decoding is handled by an ESS ES6461SSA chip, the same as used on the Storex StoryDisk. You get similarly poor video decoding. It only plays MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, XviD) codecs and only in SD format. Unfortunately, these formats are less and less used. It recognises AVI, DVVIX and MP4 containers.

The player does make up some ground on the audio side. MP3, AAC, WMA and OGG files are all supported. It doesn't however use ID3 tags so you need to name your audio files if you want to be able to find them again. Moving on to photos, JPEG and BMP formats are recognised. Transition time between photos is from 3 to 4 seconds, which is pretty average. All our test photos were displayed however, including those taken with a 21 Mpixel camera. Subtitling support is also good with SRT, SUB, SSA and SMI. It can't handle multi-audio video tracks however. Only the first audio track can be listened to.

Connectivity: HDMI and USB

The connectivity at the back is fairly standard with HDMI, RCA, YUV, coaxial and optical sockets. The only extra is a USB host on the right side of the device for connection of a USB key or other external hard drive. HDMI, RCA and USB cables are supplied to link the device to a computer.