Which Network MediaPlayer is recommended?

[Paulbhart]

I see a couple of alternatives currently on the market.

The Prismiq Product Click Here

The Hauppauge Product
Click Here

To me it seems if you have the $$$ the Prismiq is the correct product. It claims to support divx, and thus you can greatly reduce the amount of disk space necessary.

Anyone which any real world experience care to comment?

-Paul

[jmaver]

I had a Prismiq media player for a few months. I sold it because it was no where near ready for general use. It tries to be a multi-purpose device, but did nothing well. The organizational system was cumbersome - especially for large numbers of items like mp3's, etc. I found initially it was pretty interesting - could play my ReplayTV mpegs, etc. But after the newness wore off, it was disappointing. The continue to come out with software updates, so perhaps soon it will be up to snuff, but for now, I would still avoid it.

[nanook105]

I also have a Prismiq, and agree with Paulbhart to an extent - they are trying to squeeze too much functionality into these types of products and not doing anything well.

This device does work well for me in the short term. My primary need is a device that will allow playback of recorded TV shows on a TV not connected to a PC. Viewing movies also works well, but sound quality (which is acceptable for TV) is not acceptable for watching movies. However, my wife and kids do not have any problems watching movies with the current sound quality. Viewing pictures and playing MP3s are secondary at this point.

All of these devices (INCLUDING SNAPSTREAM) have issues with user presentation when you have large volumes of files (music, pictures, etc). If I look back at some of the early MP3 players, they had the same issues (some still do).

I would recommend that you need to treat this as a project and make a list of features that you are interested in. Prioritize them and see which product fits best at that time. Unfortunately, with the software release cycles of these products, your choice today will be different tomorrow.

[rakeshagrawal]

something exciting about the Hauppauge Media MVP product is that they eventually plan to release an SDK that will allow a lot of custom development. and, of course, no one has come close to their price point of $99.

I will also mention that prismiq has some new software which is supposed to improve their interface (among other things) -- that's always been my biggest gripe about this device. the interface used to be really awkward because you basically had to control this mouse pointer around the screen to select things rather than just hitting up/down/left/right. I haven't tried the new software but it is supposed to address this. Their support of DivX is through transcoding on the PC. So it's not that the box will natively playback DivX, it just gets converted to something the box can playback on the PC which means you need some available horsepower on your PC when playing it back.

[GJM]

I've got an MVP and I love it. The only real complaint is the inability to start playback at any point in the file and the slow FF. I'd like to see the ability to resume where you left off and a skip function. Now that the beta version is out that supports more then one unit I am going out later today to get a second one.

I've tried to get my HTPC to playback my mpeg2 files but it just doesn't work as well as the MVP. Now that I can add a second MVP my HTPC will stay as a HDTV decoder and recorder only. Which is fine because the MVP uses less power and boots up faster then the HTPC does.

I'm not concerned about any shortfalls that the MVP has because I'm sure that they will be addressed in the future by both Hauppauge and thrid parties. This is a great product at a great price.