Nixeus Fusion XS Brings Marvell into the DMA Market
by Ganesh T S on March 11, 2011 8:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Marvell
- Media Streamer
- Android
- Nixeus
The Fusion XS is slated to launch in late Q2 with a MSRP of $169.99. Seeing the pricing strategy on the Fusion HD, I fully expect the street price to be closer to $150. Unlike some other media streamer manufacturers, Nixeus must be commended for advertising only what they plan to deliver and can already see working with Marvell's current SDK.
The Fusion XS joins the Fusion HD in the Nixeus Fusion Series family of media players. What does this mean for the current Fusion HD owners? Nixeus confirms that they are still working on new firmware to fix most of the bugs we reported in our review. They are looking to extend the life of the Fusion HD with continued support and even considering some minor hardware revisions. The Sigma 8655 is a very stable reliable solution due to the maturity of its development. If they manage to get Adobe Flash Lite on it similar to what WD did with the Live Hub, the UI could indeed take a turn for the better. It is refreshing to see Nixeus pledge support for their previous generation products and keep their initial customers happy.
The Nixeus Fusion XS is Marvell's launch vehicle in the DMA space. The fact that it runs Android makes it an exciting product to look forward to. As always, wait for our review to find out how good Android is on a media streamer, and also to find out whether the Nixeus Fusion XS is a fit for your media streaming needs.
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therealnickdanger - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
If it's any bit as good as the QDEO chip in my LG BH-200 Blu-ray/HD-DVD player (a few years old now), then it should easily beat the HQV benchmarks. After all, it easily meets HQV's own Reon chip in those tests. I'm excited to see what this can do for BD ISOs! :)fbking - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
it will be selling on fookbuy.com very soon! so you can try when you get it from fookbuy.comganeshts - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
For a moment, I thought it was a spam post :)Anyways, estimated ship date is not earlier than end of May 2011. Engineers are still working on the final firmware.
Venya - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
Why they go with such crappy custom interface??Use XBMC as fontend interface and success of this product will be guaranteed!
ganeshts - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
XBMC is a bit resource intensive and also requires a 3D graphics engine with full OpenGL ES 2.0 support to have good performance.The SMP 8656 will probably be the first media streamer SoC in the market which can run XBMC, but even that has some issues:
http://xbmc.org/theuni/2011/01/12/more-about-sigma...
It will be quite some time before you actually get XBMC running on proper media streaming SoCs such as those from Sigma, Realtek and Marvell.
Rainman200 - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
XBMC also requires an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable GPU to run as well, XBMC devs are handling Arm ports themselves and it works well under linux on the dev kits they have access too (there are a couple of different hardware acceleration API's in Arm so not all are supported).The Marvell soc looks quite good it's a shame it does not have a GPU on it as it could have run XBMC reasonably well even better than the AppleTV2, hopefully the second generation 88DE3100 comes to market sooner.
This does look pretty nice though from Nixeus, if your making a media streamer the main thing to borrow from XBMC is it's media source system, instead of browsing through UPnP/NFS/AFP/SMB/USB you just add a source and browse though those desired items, it's so much more elegant than the typical systems used in media streamers.
Also hiring someone with UI design experience or even XBMC skinner to build your players UI is one of the best things you can do even if your streamer cant do as fancy a UI as XBMC. Don't leave it to software engineers or whatever comes with the SDK.
Destiny - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
I see a "GFX Engine" on the Marvell chipset block diagram... is that a GPU or seperate GPU?ganeshts - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
The GPU is covered in detail in the text :) It is the Vivante GC300 which supports OpenGL, but it is not a 3D graphics engine, rather 2D only.Even if XBMC were to be ported onto this, it will not have good performance. It looks like even the SGX531 is having a bit of trouble keeping up?
Destiny - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
What chipsets or hardware is using the SGX531?ganeshts - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link
Sigma Designs SMP 8656 in the TViX Xroid A1, but the TViX model doesn't run XBMC, but custom GUI (you can see the demo in the YouTube video linked in the article)