HDI Dune BD Prime 3.0 Blu-ray media player

One box, plays all?

While the option of plugging in your own external HDD using the eSATA port may not be as aesthetically pleasing, it's certainly more flexible. If you want Wi-Fi you will need to buy a dongle with HDI recommending the D-Link DWA-140 for optimal out-of-the-box performance. Incidentally, while the Dune will read and write to FAT32 and EXT2/3 formatted storage, NTFS drives are read-only.

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Like all the best modern media streamers, the Dune supports a broad selection of video and audio files. The codecs and containers are all listed on HDI's Dune product page but the Vorbis codec is excluded. So, not only could we not play our Ogg Vorbis music files, but we couldn't play any of our MKV videos with Vorbis sound files either, and that is just not good enough.

Flash is the other missing file type though HDI does promise that Flash Lite 3 will arrive in a future firmware update. The Dune played all the other 1080p test files we threw at it without a hitch along with a selection of Blu-ray ISO and VIDEO_TS files. It also managed to interpret all the advertised subtitle formats.

For those wanting to take their network a step beyond run-of-the-mill UPnP media streaming the Dune supports SMB, NFS and FTP file sharing and it comes with built-in support for IPTV, Internet radio and torrent downloading. Yet all three features involved a fair amount of messing around to set up, so we are not too sure how much use they will prove to be for the less tech savvy.

Under the hood the Dune is powered by a 667Mhz Sigma Designs 8642 processor with 512MB of RAM and 128MB of ROM, which is enough to keep the OS moving at a fair old lick. To take advantage of BD-Live you will need to stick a flash drive into one of the USB ports and initialise it with a firmware patch. That done we settled back to put the Blu-ray player through its paces.

Set-up menu

Load up time for discs ranged from a poor 'best' of 1min 20secs to a geological 2min 11secs but, once loaded, picture quality proved to be very good with excellent definition and beautiful colour saturation and balance all apparent in Casino Royale. Upscaled standard definition DVD also looked good on the 50in LG plasma we partnered the Dune with.