Dune HD Readies High-End Blu-ray Player with Hard Drive Bays
Dune HD will launch a $3,000 reference level Dune HD Pro Blu-ray player with two 3.5-inch hard drive bays in the first half of 2012, U.S. General Manager Mark Donnigan said. The Pro player will be demonstrated at CES, he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
The Dune HD Pro, Max and Smart B1 Blu-ray players all will contain THX Media Director, with the latter models adding it via a firmware upgrade later this year, Donnigan said. Media Director is essentially an auto-calibration system that allows a home theater to automatically select the most appropriate playback settings and modes based on the content. For a Blu-ray player, embedded metadata is read off a disc and relayed via HDMI to a TV or other display.
At the core of Dune HD Pro will be Sigma Designs’ 3D-capable SMP8910 device (CED March 18 p1) that was scheduled to start volume production in Q3 (CED March 18 p2) and integrates VXP video processing technology onto a single IC. The 8910 strips out the decoding from the SMP8644 that’s used in Blu-ray players and replaces it with VXP’s scaling, noise reduction and deinterlacing technology. The chip supports Skype and over-the-top content at the same time and decodes H.264, RealD, Sensio, MVC and TDVision. In addition to the 8910, the THX-certified Dune HD Pro will have Burr-Brown DACs, two hard drives for up to six terabytes of storage and a touch screen on the front to control the Blu-ray player, Donnigan said. Dune HD will start the 8910 with its top-end model and then add it to other players, Donnigan said.
While Dune HD’s new Blu-ray player will bow at a time when most Blu-ray players sell for under $200, the company will “make some good money” on the component, Donnigan said. Development of the high-end model will be funded by sales of lower-priced media players, the first of which, the HD TV 101, will add Walmart’s Vudu service by mid-November, Donnigan said. Dune HD will work to add other services, including Best Buy’s CinemaNow, by later this year, he said. The HD TV 101 and 301 ($100-$149), the latter adding a 2.5-inch hard drive bay, will be upgraded to add IPTV and video-on-demand using software tools, Donnigan said. Both players have a HDMI 1.3 connector, USB 3.0 port, a built-in BitTorrent client for downloading files from peer-to-peer networks, and can record and play back DTV channels using an optional USB dongle. The players will be targeted at a range of operators, including Internet-based ethnic programming services like Russian-language Kartina.TV, which has 120 channels. Both players are expected to be available by Q4 and are built around Sigma’s SMP8670 processor, Donnigan said. The SMP8670 operates at 700 MHz, a step up from SMP8650, which is at about 500 MHz. The players have 256 MB RAM and 128 MB flash memory.
Third-party manufacturers build Dune HD’s players in Taiwan and China, and the company has 40 software engineers based in Moscow, Donnigan said. The software engineers are charged with developing applications for Dune products and worked with THX in developing Media Director for the HD Max Blu-ray player. Initial Media Director development was finished in 60 days and the platform demonstrated on the Max Blu-ray player at CEDIA earlier this month was 60 percent to 70 percent complete, Donnigan said.