Digital Trends

FIA On3 November 15th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Installation and Configuration

Initial setup of the FIA On3 is quite easy — simply connect the unit to your network, display, and sound system, plug the power in and power it up. The CD included with the On3 retail package features FIA's “POPassist” utility, a program that helps you locate and connect to your On3. If you are able to find the IP address of your On3 by other means, such as looking at the DHCP status in your router, then you don't need to use the CD. POPassist points your browser to the On3 management console, similar to other networked devices such as routers.

The web management utility can be used to control most of the settings of the On3. Since the On3 runs the file sharing protocol SAMBA and publicly shares its music, movies, and pictures folders by default, you don't even need to use the utility to get started. Just browse to the correct folder and drag-and-drop your media to the folder with any computer on your network. Once you have transferred data to the On3, it can be turned on and used to view images and videos and listen to music.

The web management utility has a good looking interface

As long as you put your music, movies, and music in the corresponding folders, the On3 should properly identify the digital media loaded on its hard drive when you power the unit on.

Once we powered the unit on, our hopes of the On3 being the easy to use media player that FIA claimed were dashed. Once the unit booted, it was clear that we were dealing with the same software that drives the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player we reviewed in June. The On3 is in effect, the same thing as the Actiontec player, minus the wireless capability (although a wireless version is available) and with an added internal hard drive. This was quite a letdown, as our testing would soon show that the FIA On3 suffered from the same issues that the Actiontec player does.

Usage and Testing

As was the case with the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player, the FIA On3 lacks the host of audio playback features that digital audio buffs are used to. There is no way of making playlists on the fly or smart playlists, or even playing playlists at all. You can only play music sorted in folders, so if your music is sorted by artist and album, you can only listen to each folder at a time. Files are played back in alphanumeric order, so playback order depends on how the tracks are named. The On3 does not handle ID3 tags and track names are simply the name of the file.

Audio quality was acceptable. Digital music is only as good as the encoding process used to create it. We tested with all of the supported formats and found that with our high-quality MP3, OGG, WAV and AAC files, the On3 sounded great when connected through is digital outputs. Analog output was similarly clean and full, and as long as our source files were good quality, the music sounded great.

Accessing your files is easy to do with the On3's menu

Digital video playback is also only as good as your source, and the hard truth with digital video right now is that unless you are making your own videos, there isn't much of a quality selection available. Home videos turned into MPEG files looked excellent, as did some movie trailers we downloaded from the internet. DivX and XviD support is a nice-to-have feature, but unless you are involved in the illegal download of copyrighted materials, you won't have much of a choice in legal material. We did experience some stuttering of large MPEG files, a problem that made watching some home videos and TV shows recorded with a capture card hard to watch.

Image playback is the strong suit of the FIA On3. It works pretty much like we'd expect it to and has a few nice features as well. One great feature is the ability to tie a music list to playback of a folder of pictures, allowing you to have a music background to your slideshow. Conversely, you can tie a folder of images to a folder of music, allowing you to view pictures when you select that music folder. You can choose to play your images in order (the alphanumeric rule applies here too) or randomly by folder. The On3 resizes images to your screen size on the fly. As a result very large images may take a while to load and small images will be quite distorted.

The responsiveness of the On3 remote control was the same as what we experienced with the Actiontec media player. There is a bit of a lag associated with button pushes on the remote, and as a result, a noticeable lag occurs when you switch songs or change images or movies. One major criteria we use in testing digital media players is if they perform better than the old-world products they are intended to replace. In this case, the On3 does not react as fast, or faster, than a CD player or DVD player.