Network media players

[Darth Wong]

Has anyone got any experience with these things?

I'm looking for something with HDMI connections that will play off USB sticks and LAN sources (by which I mean any source which is sharing files, not just Windows Media Center), but which also has its own internal HD and has a reasonably intuitive user interface for selecting and moving and manipulating material. And no, I'm not talking about a full-fledged HTPC. It should be quiet, easy for kids or my wife to use, and have a clean remote control.

I found out about the Popcorn Hour A110 and the HDX 1000, but I have no real idea whether these things are any good. For every review I see that's positive, I see reviews where people make it sound like the products are unreliable and the whole market sector is still too immature to buy into.

[phongn]

I was considering an A110 myself but have no personal experience. At least for me, the big issue seemed to be streaming content to it (the onboard 100-megabit Ethernet implementation isn't that good)

[Beowulf]

I'm pretty sure X360s can play files off shared drives (though I haven't yet managed to figure out how to do so). It will play properly formatted files off thumbdrives. You can get a Harmony remote, and have a fairly nice remote for all your A/V setup.

[General Zod]

I'm pretty sure X360s can play files off shared drives (though I haven't yet managed to figure out how to do so). It will play properly formatted files off thumbdrives. You can get a Harmony remote, and have a fairly nice remote for all your A/V setup.

There's a media center extension on the 360 for media-center based PCs, although its been somewhat clunky to set up from my experience. (It's wireless, and thus somewhat laggy). The problem with playing media on it though is the poor codec support; good luck getting anything to play that doesn't meet its specific requirements. Popcorn Hour is a bit more flexible in that from what I hear but you have to provide your own hdd.

[Starglider]

The PS3 will do all of that. I don't have one and I don't want one, but several of my friends do and it does make an effective media center (particularly if you don't already have a blu-ray player). Your kids being able to play games on it may or may not be a useful bonus - it's slightly quiter and has a simpler user interface than the 360.

[Darth Wong]

I'd prefer something that will play pretty much any media I throw at it, not just stuff that's formatted to a particular specification. It would ideally be reasonably quiet and economical on power too. The XBox 360 has a loud fan and has constant power usage between 150 and 350 watts, which is pretty goddamned ridiculous. It would take several PCs to equal that.

[Stark]

The 360->Windows interface (whether you use WMP or WMC) is inane and format-limited (although you can edit registry etc to get WMC to use different formats). I'd be very curious to hear how you go with whatever you get, Mike, because I'm motivated by the same issues.

[Laird]

The X360 will naitvely play mp4, divx/xvid, mp3, etc from a shared folder on a computer if it is in the supported codecs on the 360. If the codec is old or not common you will need a media converter program/transcoder like tversity. http://tversity.com/

I have two x360s one for gaming the other as a media box, and I am happy with it.

[Dominus Atheos]

What codecs and formats would you want to play? DivX, WMV, H264? .MP4, Matroska?

[JointStrikeFighter]

We have a Mediagate MG-450HD. Supports a huge range of codecs and at fraction of the price of a console or media centre PC. It's a pretty solid device.

[Darth Wong]

Found a handy article about NMTs:

http://www.mpcclub.com/modules/Reviews/ ... -CLASH.pdf

It seems as if most of the current generation of network media players with built-in storage (also called NMTs, or Network Media Tanks) is all based around a single operating system made by Syabas, so you're getting basically the same interface and basic functionality no matter which brand you go with. They all have a network connection, an internal hard drive, and the ability to serve up files to the network and copy files from the network.

There's also a non-networked option: Western Digital has a media player which offers all the functionality of these other players but is not networked. However, it's also ridiculously cheap, which is an important advantage (especially for a product which is in a fast-moving high tech field and could easily be superseded by something much better a year from now). It's designed to be paired up with a USB hard drive, but if you used it with a hard drive dock, you could easily swap hard drives in and out of it for truly absurd storage (and you could load up those hard drives at your computer, assuming you also had a dock there).

HP also has something called the MediaSmart Connect which is really slick (click here; it's easily the classiest-looking unit among all of these) and has all the bells and whistles. Also, it's backed up by a far more mammoth support organization than any of these dipshit NMT vendors can muster. However, it is limited to 1080i, not 1080p. It also seems to have a Windows-centric design, and I can't tell if it offers NFS support. And of course, it's relatively expensive compared to the others.

JSF mentioned the Mediasonic MediaGate player, which looks intriguing but the manufacturer's product page seems to suggest that the only file sharing protocol it supports (either as a client or server) is FTP, and it seems to have limited file format support compared to the others. It also seems to cost slightly more than the HDX1000, even though the HDX1000 has more features.

So, to me it looks like it's coming down to the HDX1000 and the WDTV. The former has all the features I want, and I know where I can get it in Canada. The latter has no networking support, which is a pretty big minus because it means I can't stream Internet content to it, but it's so cheap that I'm tempted to just buy it anyway and use SneakerNet, since I already have a couple of hard drive docks I can use with it (not to mention a spare 500 GB USB HD literally laying around collecting dust).

[JointStrikeFighter]

FTP and USB on the Mediagate.

[General Zod]

FTP and USB on the Mediagate.

USB isn't a file sharing protocol.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Just to clarify, the Mediagate can access other computers via wifi or LAN to view media, but media cant be copied to it's internal HDD except via USB or FTP.