Let's have a look now at the hardware that powers the Veolo player and how the player performs in various benchmarks and games.

The Veolo is equipped with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. Below you see some details of the hardware, as it is reported by the AnTuTu Benchmarking software:

The main PCB is the HiSilicon Hi3716C. Coupled with the ARM Cortex A9 processor, the Hi3716C provides the processing capability of 2500 MIPs, according to the board's official specifications. As the Hi3716C has two built-in Ethernet interfaces, two USB ports, and one SATA/eSATA interface, it supports flexible connection schemes. The Hi3716C also supports high-definition video decoding in various formats (including MPEG2, H.264, AVS, RealVideo, and VC-1). In addition, the Hi3716C provides audio and video input interfaces and provides 3D acceleration engine and standard Open GL ES2.0/1.1/1.0 interface.

The ACRyan Veolo player doesn't exactly have all the above specs, since it comes with 232RAM and 3.0GB of internal memory, and not any eSATA ports.

Let's run some benchmarks now. We first tried to copy a 700MB file from our 1Gbit LAN to an external USB2.0 HDD. The reported speed was around 9.0 Mb/s. The same copying task to the player's 4GB internal memory was even slower at just 2.4Mb/s. It seems that the internal memory is slow and it should be only used to install apps.

The results of a series of benchmarks are illustrated below:

The NenMark 2.2 benchmark provides performance information with other Android-based devices, at least related to the OpenGL benchmarks. As you see in the graph below, the Veolo player had a decent GPU performance with 21.20 FPS, whereas the Samsung Galaxy II smart phone got around 54.10 FPS and Nvdia's Tegra 2 solution returned around 27.0 FPS:

- Video/Audio Performance

For our video playback tests with the Veolo player we we used the latest version of the Mxplayer (+mxplayer codec ARMv7), which supports hardware acceleration. Although the default player will also work fine, we think that the Mxplayer gives some extra features and better subtitles management/appearance:

First we fired up several video clips with various resolutions and up to 1080p x264-encoded material. All these were reproduced correctly and without any issues. The player supports a variety of video formats (ASF / AVI / DAT / FLV / M2T / M2TS / MKV / MOV / MP4 / MPG / MPEG / RM RMVB / TP / TRP / TS / VOD / WMV / MTS / M1V / M2V / M4V / 3GP / F4V M2P / 3G2).

We also tested the player's abilities to playback high-bit rate encoded material. Using the default player, the Veolo got a perfect score for the bird90.m2ts clip (90mbits bit rate). On the other hand, the Mxplayer returned some choppy playback for the same file.

Regarding audio support, the Veolo supported DD+, DD-EX, DD, DTS ES PCM, DTS, DTS 96 24, and DTS Vorbis encoded clips. The player did not play the DD TrueHD clip (DD_TrueHD.m2ts) files. Finally the DTS MA clip (DTS_MA.m2ts) was playable with some sporadic shuttering .

The subtitles are very well-displayed in the MxPlayer no matter what language we chose among the supported 20 languages. The position, color and size of the subtitles are

Subtitles position/color/size are easily adjustable via the corresponding menu:

So far so good, let's now see what the player doesn't support:

• Ability to playback 24p encoded files. AC Ryan posted at their forums that they are working on it "...will try to update this post as soon as i have more information or confirmation about the 24p option.  This is one of the points we are working on. At this point it is not 100% clear yet if the chipset can handle this hardware wise but we try our best to get this implemented in a firmware update. Until we have more information about this we can only say that it's not supported at the moment. Therefore it's also not mentioned in our specs yet..."
• No support for High profile H264 (main@Level 5) encoded files. AC Ryan says "...High Profile is very resource demanding. Therefore it will not playback properly on the players. To our knowledge all current media players have this issue..."
• Playback natively ISO files (either DVD or Blu-ray). AC Ryan says that "...Iso playback: we are working on this to have it supported by our software. Experimental you can make use of the built-in es file explorer for now. Open es from the app center and browse to your dvd .iso file. Press and hold the 'select' button on the remote control and choose 'open as' -> 'video' -> 'es video/media player'. It will open the .iso file and display the menu but the navigation buttons will not work. Usually the dvd will start after a short time. As mentioned this is experimental and can work with some dvd's..."

- Gaming Performance

The player's 1.0GHz processor should be powerful enough to adequately play most games. We installed the famous Angry Birds application and we got smooth scrolling and music playback:

However, the Veolo remote control did not support the zoom in/out function, something that may limit your gaming experience

Graphics of the 'Air Attack' game also looked great:

The 'Fruit Ninja' app also played very well:

Of course, there are several other games that are not completely compatible with the Veolo player. Below you can see a list of them and some comments.

- Internet Tests

Using the default Internet navigation app, the Veolo player scored 216 points at the HTML5 test and a 95/100 at the Acid 3 test. Note that some applications refused to work and the Veolo reported 0% battery. The internet performance could be improved after installing the Opera or DolphinHD apps:

The Youtube application supports HD and playback was flawless: