Cyclone Primus Media Player

For the price, this is not a bad little product. I tried it with a Samsung 2TB HDD and it didn't work - since then I have bought a Seagate 2TB and all seems fine. It seems to have trouble with AVI files and I have had sync issues - have looked on various forums and it seems that this is a common failing. VOBs and ISOs play well, although there is a minor pause between each VOB file. For the money, you can't go wrong and if you are considering buying this product then I assume that you know a little about computers and media files although I would say, this is not for the uninitiated.

This is a review for the Cyclone Primus Media Player without a HDD. I bought the player to install a spare 2Tb Samsung Eco Spinpoint HDD, in order to backup/digitize my dvd collection. Installing the HDD was easy, however the base can be fiddly to put back on. The player is completely silent when on, however this depends on the HDD you install. I'd imagine an older HDD would be noisier, mine is silent. The player plays loads of video file formats including the numerous different formats of home videos I have from various mobile phones and video cameras. I have ripped my dvds to singular vob. files which play perfectly on the player, in fact the movies appear to be upscaled by the player and look better than the original dvds! You simply plug the usb cable into your pc and the player, then you can cut/copy files into the appropriate folders you create on the player's HDD. The remote has plenty of buttons and is responsive. The player itself looks good in gloss black, however do not lose the remote as there are no buttons on the player itself. However if you do lose the control you can buy a spare on amazon, so no worries. The player did not come with a HDMI cable, so I bought one from amazon for a couple of quid with gold connectors and the picture is awesome. Also I forgot to mention that it plays music files and slideshows my photo files. All in all this is a great, stylish, functional HD media player which is cheaper than others of similar quality.

This media drive does everything one would expect. Except when it comes to forward & rewind. It actually hangs for a second after you hit the fwd or rewind button, making it difficult to stop or rewind it to the exact spot required. The remote is very old fashioned of poor quality. A 10 second frame skip button like the Iomega drives remote would have also been useful.

Good product, have had no issues, easy to use, good solid product. A good solution to watch and store your media files.

I guess this player's performance is about what you would expect for the price. Plays most formats in reasonably good quality, although playback is jerky on any files that aren't 25 frames per second, particularly 24 fps. However, it's possible this could be due to the age of my 6 year old HDTV which, I understand, wasn't designed for 24 fps. Another negative is the very poor fast forward and rewind. Nothing happens at all for several seconds. In fact, performance is far worse than the much cheaper Cyclone Micro. Update 28/01/15: Having just purchased a new LG 42LB580V smart TV I can confirm that the jerkiness is the problem of the Cyclone media player and looks even worse than before. My new TV's inbuilt media player plays as smoothly as a baby's ..., so this Cyclone Primus is basically garbage.

Firstly I think this unit is on its way to being the best available. Good. Plays any movie file format I own. The picture is excellent with .MKV The remote control does not suffer from the latency of the Somovision micro player. Bad. The films will show a black screen for varying amounts of time at varying frequencies normally for a second or two at a time. I have the unit fitted with a Samsung 2TB internal drive and the issue is there regardless of movie file format or if the internal or an external drive is used. I have also formatted the drives as FAT and NTFS without any improvement. People are mentioning a firmware update on other forums for the unit so I will look into this and post more information. It really is a pity about this asI would otherwise give this unit 5 stars.

Some reviews (smaller drives) give this product one star but don't be put off by this negative feedback, this is a magic machine. It plays my music files (FLAC, APE) and any movie format I throw at it. It's a good place to store or back up your photos too. Easy file transfer from PC. OK, if all tracks from a CD are loaded separately then you have to scroll down the menu and select each track individually - same with split VOB files but I can live with that. The menu is simple and straightforward and the unit is light enough to move from room to room. Yes everything is driven from the remote and yes it could stop working but if this happens then the cost of a new enclosure won't break the bank. If you want more flexibility then buy something more sophisticated; for me it does everything I want at a bargain price.

Only three and even this mark is probably higher that it should be. It can copy only from Fat32 partitions, which makes it's own internal hard drive practically damn useless. You can't copy your dvd files or hd film files into it. So, you need to connect external hard drive, so what the hell then...