Review on 📺 Micca MPLAY-HD Mini: Ultimate Full-HD Digital Media Player for USB Drives and SD Cards by Joseph Harkins

Story: I was a bit hesitant to get one of these. I have a Visio Smart TV that is about 5-6 years old. While it works great, I have a lot of shows and movies that I love to watch stored on my computer and sometimes they play from a USB stick. The extension must be .mp4 or .m4v or the TV won't even show it in the list. I have a lot of .mkv files and after a little research I found that you can just change the .mkv extension to .mp4 and it works in most cases. Sometimes the video played but had audio codec issues and no sound. So I just run it through the converter, except of course it takes half an hour to several hours per video. Oh, and when I bring up the media player on the TV, it doesn't recognize flash drives larger than 128GB, and the more videos you have on the drive, the longer it takes to display on the TV - up to a couple of minutes. . So I'm ready to sit down and watch videos and it's always a matter of time before I see the list of videos on the TV and see if they're playing. I recently had an issue with the 32GB flash drive I was using, so I changed everything to 128GB and the TV didn't see it. The same video was moved to smaller drives twice and the video played twice in the same place and got stuck even though the timer kept ticking. I had enough and decided to give it a try. Review: I've researched them from time to time throughout the year. I wanted to buy the old version for ten dollars less but it took a few days and the new one was available the next day so I bought a new one. A very quick comparison between the two: the new one has a microSD card slot while the old one uses a standard SD slot; the new one has newer firmware (although I think both can be updated easily, but more on that later); I *think* that the old one uses a button cell battery for the remote, while the new one uses two AAA batteries (I've read about complaints about the remote that ended up being bad batteries that came with the remote). In addition to the fixed issues, I've read about fast forward issues that can be fixed with newer firmware. So I received the device and took it out of the box. Beautiful, simple, solid. I was expecting a button cell battery for the remote and was willing to test the battery before using it but not enough and lo and behold it takes two AAA batteries which were not included. I agree, I have good name brand batteries at home so I knew from the start that the batteries that came with the remote were reliable, although I tested them before installing them to be sure. I then plugged it into my TV, then stopped and went to the manufacturer's website to get the latest firmware. This is mickatron dot com. From there, select the device you have on the main page, then scroll down the product page and click on the Downloads tab. In the Firmware section, click Download. The file is zipped, so once downloaded, unzip it and save the .img file to a USB drive. Do not put it in a folder on the flash drive, otherwise the player will not see it. From there, paste it into your media player, go to the menu and select "Update Firmware". Before starting, the player will show the current firmware version on the player and the new firmware version on the flash drive. I've tried looking at the downloaded firmware file as well as the settings menu in the player to see what version everyone has, but the names aren't clear. However, once you decide to update the firmware, you will be shown which version you have and which one you will download in advance. I had something like version 3.89 while the new firmware was 3.93 so I updated it before using the player. The instructions are a bit confusing as step 3 selects 'update firmware' and clicks ok, but step 4 says to press the small reset button on the player if you want to do it manually. Step 4 really should be in parentheses at the end of step 3 or simply added as indentation at the end of the instructions. There is no need to press the reset button on the player to install the firmware if the update menu has an option to select the old or new firmware. OK, how does it work? Well I've only been using it for a few days but so far so good! The picture quality is excellent and the video, which always freezes when using the TV media player, caused no problems on the Micca. There is almost no turn on time. Now I can turn on the TV faster, switch inputs using the TV remote control, turn on the Mikka and access the files on the flash drive. The Visio TV Media Player loops through all the folder names and displays each file in random order. So if I had 150 videos, the TV would display about ten of them on a page, so I would have to scroll through 15 pages of video titles in random order. With Micca you have to select USB, then Video, then you will be presented with your files, like on your computer, folder names and all. Plus, they're organized alphabetically so you can navigate easily and find what you're looking for quickly. When the player is on, the blue LED is on, when it is off, the red LED is on. Both are a bit bright, especially the blue one, but I always use ambient light so it's not distracting or glaring. Watching TV with the lights off can be annoying. Based on the reviews I read, I was willing to open it up and replace the resistor inside with a larger one to lower the brightness, but the player is well sealed - it doesn't need a few screws from the bottom be removed to open it. If this is a big problem for you I would suggest covering the LED with a small piece of tape - just enough to cover the LED - too big a piece and you will cover the remote sensor. As far as I can tell, when the player is off (red LED), the USB stick is also off - the one I used has no backlight but felt cool to the touch - it usually gets warm when it's on. high. I was a little worried that leaving the USB stick in the player would provide 24/7 power, ultimately shortening its lifespan, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Great sauce. Ultimately, it's a great player and far less of a hassle than plugging an old laptop into the TV, waiting for it to boot up every time I want to watch a video, and then having a dedicated remote or keyboard and mouse pad lying around in the living room to have . .