It's becoming quite clear that, after winning the HD format war, Sony's Blu-ray format will have to go against yet another mighty foe in the field of content distribution, namely that of digital multimedia downloads and streaming. However, there are certain companies quite keen on taking full advantage of both solutions, one of the best examples being HDI, offering users its Dune BD Prime media player with support for Blu-ray disc playback.

The device from HDI is built around a Sigma Designs 8634 SoC, accompanied by 384 MB of RAM, 64 MB flash and 1GB of NAND flash memory for Java support on the latest and future Blu-Ray disks (Profile 2.0).

Connectivity-wise, the Dune BD Prime is provided in four different versions: a basic one, then Dune BD Prime + Wi-Fi 802.11n, Dune BD Prime + Ethernet 1000 Mb/s and Dune BD Prime + 2 x eSATA. Besides these optional interfaces, the Dune BD Prime also offers pretty much every single connectivity option one might expect from a modern set-top box, namely HDMI 1.3, Composite, component and S-Video video outputs, as well as optical and coaxial digital and 7.1 analogue audio output.

Now, in order to help you get a more or less accurate idea regarding what this product really has to offer, we'll divide the compatibility list into three different elements: containers, video and audio codecs. As far as container files are concerned, the Dune BD Prime should work with pretty much every file format “floating” around the Internet, as for example MPEG (MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS, VOB, M2TS), AVI, MOV, MP4, MKV, ASF (typical file extensions: .ASF, .WMV), DVD-ISO, VIDEO_TS (DVD-Video playback, including DVD menu support) and raw video.

Things are equally extensive in the field of supported codecs, since the Dune BD Prime will work quite well with MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, XVID, WMV9, VC1 and H.264 video codecs, plus AC3(DD), EAC3 (DD+), DTS, MPEG (layers 1/2/3), AAC, LPCM, WMA and WMAPro audio codecs. It also supports subtitles, in plain text, SSA/ASS, VOB and SRT formats.

The basic version of the Dune BD Prime is available for 449 Euros ($640), with prices for the following models going nowhere but upwards. However, given the rather hefty price point, it's very likely that the rate of adoption for HDI's product will not be that impressive, especially given the rather tough times consumers are going through right now.


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