Review: Mede8er MED600X3D High Definition Media Player (2024)

New year is a good time for new media player. My old Mede8er MED500X is a good media player. But after more than 6 years of usage, it started to show its age. Occasional crashes and the loud fan noise are clear indicators that the old champ is no longer as cool as it used to be.

Since I was happy using Mede8er, my choice for a new media player is the latest model of Mede8er. MED500X is their first gen product. Right now, their latest models are third gen products, indicated by X3D on the model numbers. There are 3 choices for third gen Mede8er: MED600X3D, MED800X3D and MED1000X3D. All three products have similar specs capable to play 3D movies. MED600X3D is a simple model without internal HDD, making it the most compact model. MED800X3D has space to install 3.5″ internal HDD, making it about the same size as my old MED500X. MED1000X3D also has internal HDD, but it has mechanism allowing users to replace the internal HDD (3.5″) easily. In a way, they make HDD to act like a removable media, just like DVD back in old days.

Since I got WiFi and 3TB Western Digital My Book Live NAS drive, I rarely use the internal HDD inside MED500X anymore. Most of my movies are streamed directly from NAS. So I choose MED600X3D, the simplest model without internal HDD. I ordered the model with integrated WiFi so I don’t need to purchase a separate USB dongle for WiFi connection.

The process of installation is easy. It’s still the same Mede8er that I love, plus some cool new features. MED500X has good and simple media library display. MED600X3D makes it even better with more options on display mode. I particularly like that MED600X3D no longer show the dot underscore hidden files created by my Mac computer in NAS drive. Seeing a lot of OS-created files together with our actual media files was a bit frustrating when using MED500X and I’m really glad they fix this thing in their new model.

Without the need to provide space for internal HDD, MED600X3D is beautifully small. A comparison photo with my old MED500X shows the size of these two great media players.

Other features like playing music and photos remain. The useful watch indicator is also there, along with some security features like folder protection and PIN. Now that my WiFi module is integrated, I feel like I can start connecting to my network faster after MED600X3D starts.

Just like what I usually do with my old MED500X, the first thing to do after setting up MED600X3D is to upgrade its firmware. My unit arrived with firmware 3.0.2 installed, and I immediately upgraded it to 3.0.6. Firmware 3.0.7 is still in beta version, hopefully will be released as stable update soon.

One very good improvement is the ability to play MKV movies encoded in H.264 Hi10p bitrate. Yes, my anime files play correctly in MED600X3D. Well, most of them actually. Some files play with noticeable color issues and occasional pixelation. Still more than watchable, just not perfect. The greater issue is probably on the soft-encoded subtitles. If the MKV files contain non-standard subtitle that is programmed to display some text in specific location, it won’t display the subtitle, and it stops displaying subtitle for the rest of the movie. I can easily fix this by turning off subtitle from the menu, then turn it on again. But if a movie has subtitle with a lot of this compatibility issue, it becomes rather annoying to keep fixing the subtitle as we watch the movie. This is something they really really need to fix, real soon.

A very useful new feature added in MED600X3D is the ability to download subtitle, right from the device as we watch a movie. That is pretty cool.

I tested many movie formats and encoding, MED600X3D could play vast majority of them, Overall experience of movie watching is better than MED500X thanks to better navigation which allow us to seek faster to move forward or backward in a movie.

MED600X3D has some new features related to Internet movie streaming. I don’t really use them since I’m happy with my Apple TV for online streaming.

Movie jukebox feature allows MED600X3D to download information about our movie collection from the Internet. Then it will display the correct movie poster, along with actor names and short description. Looks cool for showing our collection to friends, but not really useful when we use the media player for ourselves. We know movies we owned. And the jukebox database is somehow limited to 3000 entries, or it will create problems with the device.

In conclusion, I consider this a worthy upgrade. Still not perfect, but better than most other media players in the market.

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