Network Media Players

Although these devices have been around for a few years now, they are just now hitting the mainstream for consumers.  Prior to that, the market was smaller and targeted at the enthusiasts.  Recently, big players such as Western Digital hit the stores with a couple of devices called WD TV and more recently the WD TV Live.  The WD TV Live is the first network product to hit wide spread acceptance and sells for about $129 MSRP.  The unit itself works very well and plays “almost” every format known to man.  It has a very clean interface and plays photos, music, and virtually all types of movies including Blue Ray rips (MKV, TS, and MT2S).  The only real limitation at the present is the lack of lossless audio support.  It does support audio pass-through for DTS-MA but not True-HD (possibly fixed in future firmware updates).

A little over a year ago, I set out to find way to play all my video that was stored on my server and to play it at full resolution of my HDTV. Although I had a HTPC (Home Theater PC) attached to my plasma TV, adequate software was not available (at that time) to allow HD formats (both video and audio) to play through windows media center. Furthermore, you have to spend quite a bit of money to equip yourself with an HTPC. To fill that void, products such as the PCH A-110, the HDX 1000, and the WD TV Live emerged which cost around $200 or less could play everything. Although the interface is pretty crude, it is very functional and it works. A-110 plays music, photos, video files, and all types of movie files including every Blue Ray rip I could throw at it. It allows for HD audio formats to pass through the HDMI port to your receiver and it can also downgrade HD audio to standard DTS if you do not have a current receiver. This leads me up to why these devices work best for me. As you know by now, I have a Windows Home Server with a large amount of storage and it contains everything I have in terms of media and I wanted to be able to stream this data across my network to take advantage of the Cat 6 cable which I have run through most of my house. As a result I tested several of these products and highly recommend either of these for this task. Essentially many of these units are made from a reference design supplied from Syabas and both use a Sigma Designs CPU (Popcorn and HDX). So basically, both units I reference above are essentially the same but packaged in different enclosures. The WD TV Live uses a newer Sigma chip, costs less, but suffers from some minor bugs which should be resolved in upcoming firmward. Below are the details of the hardware and at the bottom of page I included some reference links on the equipment which will give you more details to help you research which equipment is right for you.

WD TV LIve:  http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=735

Popcorn A-110:  http://www.popcornhour.com

HDX 1000:  http://www.hdx1080.com/