Introduction
Blu-ray, HEVC 10Bit, 4K 60Hz, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and HDMI 2.0a… Yup, that’s part of the features from the latest media player with me – Egreat A10 4K Blu-ray HDD Media Player. It is the first exclusive Android HDD media player with full function 4K Blu-ray navigation, decoding all contents of the Blu-ray movies. Powered by HiSilicon Hi3798CV200 chipsets. Loaded with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Come with an internal 3.5 inch HDD rack with support up to 8TB drive for all your favourite movies. Lot of connectivity like 802.11 b/g/n/ac 2.4G/5G Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and Gigabit LAN. And a have stylish yet durable casing just like the photo. Interested? Read on to find out…
Special Thanks
This review is possible thanks to below companies. Be sure to check them out…
- Egreat for this Egreat A5 Professional 4K Blu-ray HDD Media Player and Egreat A5
- HiMedia for HiMedia Q10 Pro
- Kingston for Kingston SSDNow UV400 SSD
- MINIX for MINIX NEO A3
- GameSir for GameSir G4s
- GearBest for Redmi Note 4X
Package Content
The largest package for TV box that I own. As usual, Egreat A10 comes in a well-protected packaging. Mine is from Unimax Pro, Malaysia locally this round. After took out Egreat 10, you can find other stuffs like 2 detachable antennas, HDMI, composite audio video & SATA cable, power adaptor, IR remote control with battery and user guide. Yes, the best user manual is there for A10 too. For your information, it is very detail and loaded with lot of coloured pictures. And soft copy is available to download from their website. Do check out A10 specs there too. Lot of them to be listed here.
Build Quality & Design
Egreat A10 is using Aluminium alloy with wire drawing process as casing. Top notch build quality no doubt – stylish, premium and sturdy. Just refer to the photos below and you will know what I mean. And it has a very unique front metal cover that hide the hard drive too. You can insert / remove HDD from front and not top or side. A saver for those with small cabinet. There is a LED white-Light dot matrix panel just besides it. Infrared receiver and power light indicator are there too.
Yup, this is the hidden internal 3.5 inch HDD rack that I talking about. All metal material is being used here.
LED display that show useful information like clock, remaining movie time, Wi-Fi, resolution and more. Brightness is good for both day and night. You can turn it off totally too.
Here is the air intake. Yup, there is a fan behind the case that keep the media player cool especially when there is HDD spinning. No worry, it is quiet and fan speed is automatically controlled based on temperature. Manual control is available too.
All the inputs / outputs are located at the back. There are 2 antenna ports, cooling fan, AC input, power switch, RS-232 port, optical, coaxial SPDIF, composite, HDMI 2.0a, USB 2.0 & USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and reset switch. Oh, there is a SATA port for extra hard drive too.
Here is the look when antennas were attached to Egreat A10. You can remove them if you plan to use Ethernet only.
Hey, check out this high quality leg. Rest assure that you are getting the best build quality here.
Wow… The bundled IR remote control has lot of buttons. Furthermore, it has LED light backlit for dark environment usage. Cover all the stuffs you need for media playback except mouse function. And 4 IR programming buttons for TV which you can keep TV remote control away. However, you still need to use air mouse for certain task as the bundled remote doesn’t has mouse function at all.
Software
A new OTA firmware update is the very first thing that I got when connected to Internet. Yes, I have no doubt of Egreat excellent support on software update. They are working hard on getting new features on the media player every month. And of course fix bugs as well. Just check their website for previous firmware revisions and you will know what I meant here. Besides OTA update, it supports local USB update too. Great if you need to start a new and clean firmware.
Clean, simple yet stylish is part of Egreat EG-UI 2.0 launcher. All the settings are matched to the main GUI as well. You can configure general, display, playback, sound and subtitle there. Also the advanced stuffs with vanilla Android interface. And Great A10 comes very clean with minimum applications installed which I prefer. There are VidOn XBMC Pro (Kodi), HappyCast, Miracast, Clean, App Store, CetusPlay and Google Play Store. For your information, Samba server is pre-installed and active. With HDD installed, you can turn A10 into a local NAS as well.
You can use CetusPlay as air mouse replacement with your iOS and Android devices. Yes, CetusPlay is a multi-function remote control app to ease your life. Normal navigation is working perfectly. Same apply to mouse function which is a must have when using Google Play Store. Everything look good until I tried to use the keyboard. Err… It is not working. Back to my air mouse.
Benchmark
HiSilicon Hi3798CV200 chipsets with ARM Cortex A53 64-bit CPU and multi-core Mali-T720 GPU are the one that power Egreat A10. With 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, how is the performance this round? Just check out my AnTuTu Benchmark, A1 SD Bench and Geekbench 4 results below to find out. As usual, 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme benchmark does not able to run due to compatibility issue with Hi3798CV200.
AnTuTu Benchmark result is align with Egreat A5 that using the same Hi3798CV200 chipset. Yes, almost the same as Amlogic S912 boxes too.
I am not able to use SSD for internal HDD test as the rack supports only 3.5″ HDD. So 1TB hard drive is being use this time. Above screenshot SATA result reflexes it. USB 3.0 result is using SSD by the way. Memory speed is the same as A5 but internal storage has improvement. For your information, the external SATA connection is limited to USB 2.0 speed only. I am getting around 38MB/s for both read and write.
Geekbench 4 is performing better than A5. Maybe more storage space and firmware improvement help.
As for connectivity, Wi-Fi range is the great. Full speed at 433 Mbps 5GHz AC and 2.4GHz at 72 Mbps. For transfer speed performance, 2.4GHz performs very well at 56 Mbits/sec on iPerf3 test. 109 Mbits/sec only for 5GHz AC which can be improved. And finally Gigabit Ethernet is scoring excellent result at 938 Mbits/sec. Ethernet connection is needed for above 100Mbits video files for sure in this case. As for Bluetooth performance, it passes 10m Bluetooth range in straight sight line easily. And manage to get connected up to 8m with obstacles. Great performance indeed. Best for gaming with Bluetooth gamepad, right?
Performance Result
Egreat A10 gives you the best visual and experience with HiSilicon Hi3798CV200 chipset and full 4K function Blu-ray navigation. Yup, you can enjoy all the videos on HDD just like Blu-ray discs themselves with native Blu-ray navigation menu. The same experience but with lot of storage disk space support up to 8TB. And don’t forget that Egreat A10 supports 4K Ultra HD H.265/HEVC high bit rate to up 400Mbps smoothly. Yes, it can play virtually any video files and types that you throw at. Furthermore, a must have feature – auto frame rate switching is supported. Smoothest playback is what you can get. And enjoy best picture quality with Imprex Engine 2.0 that gives HDR10 deep colour and BT.2020 wider colour gamut support. For your information, you can tune lot of image settings like brightness, chroma, contrast and saturation. Colour spaces like RGB, YCbCr for both 8Bit and 10Bit too to suite your preferences with Imprex Engine 2.0. Finally, popular audio codec like Dolby True HD, Atmos, DTS HD-MA and DTS:X are supported on both 5.1 and 7.1 channels (passthrough supported too).
Posters Wall is one of the nice features of A10. All these posters (or cover arts) are populated based on your local movie collections through Internet automatically and categorized. Therefore, you can further narrow down your search with filter based on type, region and year. Detailed movie information will be displayed once you click on the movie. Blu-ray navigation menu will be shown if movie supports it.
VidOn XBMC Pro which based on Kodi 16.1 is available totally free on Egreat A10. It performs just like Egreat video player with Hisicodec codec support. Therefore, you get the full hardware video acceleration but no Imprex Engine 2.0 configuration. Better user experience I must admit compare to other box that I own which need additional wrapper when Kodi is your main player. And lot of Kodi add-ons to enjoy with VidOn XBMC Pro too. Things to take note… Egreat A10 needs 30 seconds to boot up. Shutdown is instant. No root access nor Google Widevine Modular and Microsoft Playready DRMs. Therefore, Netflix in SD only. As for direct casting like miracast, it is working properly but not the smoothest out there. And Moonlight (NVIDIA GameStream) is still playable through Ethernet with 58ms latency.
Egreat A10 firmware still can be improved. I am facing the same application compatibility and multi-tasking under-performing issues just like A5. Example, Asus Zen File Manager is facing force close issue where can’t open it at all. And system started to slow down / hang once with more than 3 games opened at the same time. Hopefully, they can be solved soon…
Advantages
- 4K Ultra HD & H.265 codec support
- Crazy high bit rate videos support
- Auto frame rate switching support
- Great wireless range & Ethernet speed
- Top notch build quality
- VidOn XBMC Pro included
- Hidden internal HDD slot
- USB 3.0 port & extra external SATA port
- 4K Blu-ray navigation menu
Limitations
- Firmware still can be improved
- IR remote control without mouse function
- No physical power button
Conclusion
Egreat A10 is my daily media player in living room now. Period. Not perfect but it has the best video and audio quality. In addition, provide the best movie experience among all media players that I tried. Interested? Do visit Egreat Website for more information. And buy yours at GearBest (10% discount code – GBCNA) and Amazon.
Jayce: Does this player have the ability to play the VP9 codec?
Yes,Briguy1027.
Thank you for your fast response! That’s good to know. I have one on order, even though as of now I don’t have a 4k television, I have come across videos with 10 bit codecs that are impossible to play with my current media player. And of course the HVEC codec was also not supported on my existing machine. I’m hoping the networking also works better on the Egreat. My old player had problems finding my shares, LOL.
You are most welcome. Enjoy the great device. 🙂
Well I haven’t received it just yet, it’s supposed to show up Monday, the day of the eclipse. We’ll see if it makes it through the hoops and arrives at my door on that day, but I am excited to get it. I like how it looks compared to some of the other premium players.
By the way, the machine showed up, and I had to learn a lot. One of the most important things to recognizing the device on my network was rebooting my computer, LOL. I liked the poster set up on the Egreat main player, but it can’t seem to find my shares as easily as the Vidon or XMBC application. I’m not sure why. I had a hard time figuring out how to activate Dolby trueHD and DTS MA on the XMBC but finally found out that you need to not have android as your source but HDMI. Switching to that allowed the pass through of those lossless audio codecs. And the XMBC was able to find all of the Korean and Japanese dramas I have on my hard drive. It was pretty amazing!
Anyway, build quality of the machine is stellar, the remote is pretty nice. Getting used to having to use different keys for either the internal player or the XMBC is a bit confusing as well. I was able to get onto my Youtube account which is a bonus. I don’t know about quality but it streams quite nicely. I plan to get some sort of wireless keyboard mouse thing to better control the device and perhaps help me in working with all of those fancy apps and APKs out there that I’m clueless about.
Hi there, may i know which media player u prefer between Himedia Q10 Pro and Egreat A10?
I am using A10 now. Both of them are great in term of picture quality since using same chipset. Just firmware improvement are different…
Hello. I think both ”Dune hd” and ”Popcorn hour” give a better picture quality than Egreat.
Jayce:
I noticed you left a message on the Egreat forums. I can’t respond there because I can’t seem to log in. Eventually I think I can rejoin them. But anyway — what is the power off problem that you were talking about? I’m not familiar with it.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for dropping by. The issue – can’t power off A10 while Wi-Fi is on. No issue to power off with Wi-Fi off. A previous bug that occurs again in the latest firmware.
Ah that one. No wonder why I’ve never seen it. Darn I can’t help you with that at all. I would suggest reverting back to the version before the latest but I know doing that could be fraught with peril. I always use a wired connection for my A10 because I have 2 hard drives hooked up to it, and the fastest way to get media to the hard drives it through the network. It sucks that they haven’t worked on it in awhile. The A10 still takes a long time to boot up — up to 5 minutes before the clock comes on. Still, because of the build quality and ability to passthrough uncompressed audio, I’ve been keeping the machine.
I just really like how I can stack it, whereas most of the newest players are such odd shapes that it’s hard to stack them. That and the picture quality is top notch. Really, there isn’t a far superior option right now, no matter how far behind this machine is compared to a lot of other players. If that happens though, I probably would upgrade, but smart televisions are making it superfluous because you can use the apps on the television while you can play back shows on the A10. I pretty much have no reason to use the A10 as a streamer, just as a media player.
Jaycee
There is a new firmware that may be useful — I don’t understand how it works. That guy ECS took the firmware for the A5II which works for Android 7 and upgraded it to work for the A5, 10,11. Maybe if you checked it out you would understand how it works and explain it to me, LOL.
Brian, don’t take risk. And wait for official English release.
The only reason I am not taking the risk is because I don’t understand what they’re doing. I am under the impression that there probably won’t be an official release, though.
Hi Jayceooi,may I know how good is Egreat,Zidoo compare with Apple TV 4K?I hope your comments are honest and truth about this China products.Lots of Bias against Zidoo and Egreat as always peoples prefer Apple TV 4K over China products.
Thank you
Naushad
Never try Zidoo and Apple TV. So can’t comment much. But if you are more toward to online streaming, Apple TV is the better choice. For local movie playback, Egreat and Zidoo are better with HDD support.