HDTV Media Player - $149.99

[DarKStar]

Brand doesn't really mean much. Sony makes some great products, and some terrible ones. 12 months ago I would have considered Seagate to be a trustworthy.

This particular device is cheap, and convenient, that's it. It has numerous downsides compared to a HTPC:

- Cannot be networked; limited to 1 connected drive via USB.
- Cannot output 1080p/30 files.
- 1080p/24 judder.
- Sometimes has black/white crush issues.
- No 24/96 audio streams.
- No audio channel mixing.
- No audio/subtitle delay setting.
- No color space options.
- Audio decoding sucks, meaning this player essentially MUST be used with an HDMI receiver. This player cannot decode DTS at all, and decodes AC3 and AAC in stereo mode only, so they have to be passed through HDMI.

LOL - that's exactly why people shouldn't have major expectations at that price ! It does not have proc amps control either to adjust proper IRE/WCL/Black level either, no surprise there - BTW, the A100 (popcorn) uses the same chipset.

 

[Thund3rball]

It is what it is, a cheap and easy media solution. I don't think anyone would expect this to perform like a quality networked HTPC system with high-end parts anymore than they'd expect a $50 GPU to compare to a $300 GPU.

 

[thenewguy001]

exactly. You're paying $150 (~$120 on sale).

Compare that with having to buy:
-HTPC case ~$50 for a super cheap case
-power supply $60
-mATX motherboard $50-70
-RAM $15
-CPU with passive cooling ~$50-70 (remember this thing is silent)
-silent GPU with TV tuner and media center remote $$$150+
-OS $100+ if you run windoze
-hard drive for OS to reside on $50
-optional CD/DVD/BD player $30+
-time to build the friggin thing $how do you value your time? $20 an hour? $50 an hour? Probably take you at least 1 hour to build and test and debug it - conservatively estimating considering you probably need to babysit the damn thing for 4 hours while you install the OS and get security updates.

so at LEAST $600 by my estimate, for a HTPC using the cheapest POS hardware of every catagory above. Of course you're going to get better results compared to a $150 unit that works right out of the box.

 

[DarKStar]

The only gripe I have with products like this one is that the chipset used often can do a lot but the firmware is poorly implamented and only a fraction of the chipsets true power is used - and often if you notice IRE problems or problems with white/black levels, it all can be controled and fixed with a revised firmware, but it doesn'T happen. I wonder how those engineers who allegedly test such hardware can even overlook this - this is what bothers me.

 

[CasheKicker]

A co-worker just ordered this unit yesterday. He should have it next week.

I will question him a lot and report back when I have done some information gathering.

For the price and SILENT operation. I am thinking I will be ordering one soon too.

 

[dosmond]

WD TV

Hi Guys, I just purchased the WD TV player from newegg.ca yesterday for $99 w/free shipping, so the total came to only $114 Canadian taxes included.

At that price I could not pass it up, right now I already have an old Seagate sata 320Gb with a Vantec NexStar CX SATA to USB 2.0 & eSATA Hard Drive enclosure. The drive has my old windows xp os on it and it is bootable, but pressing the F12 key on my keyboard during the pc's post. One thing I cannot get any info on is how it handles multiple ntsf partitioning on harddrives. Does any one know if this drive will it see all the harddrives partitions and use them accordingly? or do I need to reformat the drive as one big ntsf partition? or will the WD TV in anyway fool up the os area on the drive? I would like to keep the drive as is with its existing layout intact. A media storage device with the os partition and personal file backup partition.

Any WD owners out there with some answers?

 

[Cheator]

How would this thing compete with an HTPC running XBMC? I can probably play 2x as many formats with it.

 

[S_G]

Heh, it cannot compete. XBMC is CPU-intensive, meaning you need a fairly decent CPU to run 1080p H.264 videos, but that's its only downside. XBMC is among the best, if not the best, when it comes to video decoding quality. Hopefully they start making more progress on bringing all those postprocessing features XBMC on Xbox had to the Windows/Linux/OS X versions.

Basically, XBMC for PCs is still a work-in-progress, but even so, it tops this player. Give it another year or two, XBMC for Windows will be absolutely unbeatable. XBMC: can do Internet streams; has plugins/scripts (from weather to YouTube); can catalogue all your music, TV, and movies in a very specific manner that you can define; is skinnable; supports refresh rate setting; has an amazing software scaler, and a great hardware scaler as well; can output audio streams over a digital connection bitperfect, and as of SVN version decodes Dolby TrueHD; has a built-in web/FTP/media server -- and I could go on. Heck, you can even replace the Windows Shell with XBMC and launch all your applications through it.

My current gripes with XBMC: has support for outputting at specific refresh rates for different media (ie. 24 Hz), but doesn't have anything advanced like ReClock for people stuck with 60 Hz displays; still no postprocessing/filters on Windows (only Xbox); and no advanced audio settings, like an equalizer.