620-1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player For USB Drives and SD

If you want an easy nice media player with low cost, 620 will be the best choice.

 

620 uses Realtek 1055 chipset. This chipset was released in late 2010 and players using it started showing up in early 2011. The best thing about the 1055 is that it delivers the same video and audio decoding capabilities as the high end Realtek chips, but they keep the cost down by not including network, SATA, USB3.0, and other features which users may or may not want. Essentially, if you want a well performing stand alone media player and you want it cheap, a player with the Realtek 1055 should be at the top of your list.

 

Back to 620, it's small, about the size of a paperback novel, but thinner. Lines in the front panel look fresh and energic. Metallic top panel combining with rubber painted plastic bottom cover make the product have nice looking and good touch feeling.  The back panel has HDMI, optical and AV jacks. What’s more, card reader and USB port in the side are convenient for use.

I tried a variety of different videos and music files, some more difficult to play than others, and this player handled them all. Most of the files were MKV, AVI, MP4, MOV, but I also tried a few ISOs of DVDs and BDs, some TS files, and some older WMV files. Sound track types included some of the more demanding formats like multi-channel AAC, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD, all played without issues. But I expected this since the Realtek 1055 is well known to be a great audio/video decoder chip. It's amazing how far this market has come, where a low cost player like this can handle just about everything out there, including stuff that even a low end PC can't even play correctly. So for video/audio compatibility and performance, 620 gets a solid "A", "A+" if you consider the price.

 

As with other Realtek 1055 players, 620 has a media indexing function. All the videos, music, and photos that the player finds on a drive you attach to it gets added to an index. The first time it does the indexing can take a short while, especially if you attach say a 2TB drive up to it full of media files. But after that everything is very quick. If you select say "movies" from the main screen, you are immediately shown a list of all movies, no delay at all. To find what you want to play, you bring up the search menu and start typing in a part of the name of the file you are looking for. For example, if you want to continue watching your episodes of The Family Guy, just enter "fam" press search, and the player will show you all files that have "fam" in its file name, again with no delay at all. The indexing has more parameters for music, so in addition to searching by file name, you can list music by artist, album, and etc. I find this much more convenient than the old way of going through layers of folders, endless scrolling, and etc.

 

The only downside to this is that for those with well planned and well disguised layers of folders holding super special videos - guys you know who you are - the 620 will find and index those and make them available for searching. And with the way those video titles play off of real movie titles... You've been warned. Lets move on.

 

But what if you *LIKE* going through layers of folders and doing endless scrolling to get to your movies? No problem, 620 lets you do that with a file browser feature. It's there, but I haven't used it. According to the manual, it can be used to create play lists, but I find it easier to manage my playlists on the computer and save them in a m3u format, which 620 understands and can play.

 

Setup and configuration is straight forward, since the 620 seems to auto detect what connection I am using. And if I set it to HDMI Auto, it'll even automatically determine the best resolution to use. It's completely pain free. There are quite a few configuration settings available for various things, and the manual does a good job of going through each setting, including recommendations for usage scenarios.

 

So there you have it, a great piece of modern consumer electronics using the latest technology and offered at a price that just a couple of years ago was unthinkable. I for one am thankful that the march of technology means that great products become cheaper as time goes on. For those looking for a digital media player that offers top notch playback performance and an attractive price, look no further than 620.