I dont really have advice for Zorgan so i waited to reply on this thread. I share Munkeys view really that none of these media devices are ideal, although I do think that they are still worth having and suit many people. Over a year or more I've been lucky to be able to play around with various media players in a friends shop but i have always been disappointed compared with my old rusty-trusty home server setup. Dont mean to take thread off track but i want to add my view for others to consider.
First, i'm not rich so sorry if this sounds expensive or flash because its just not, although i do get pc parts free all the time so that helps lol. Anyway, because i have loads of kids I decided a couple of years ago to run a home 'file server' for lots of reasons and its the direction that modern media-homes now really need to go
. Instead of upgrading hard-drives in 2 of the childrens bedroom pc's; upgrading my laptop hdd; upgrading the main lounge pc hdd; just to cope with the growing amount of stored media, i had to find a better way.
I started with a junk 1.2ghz P4 machine just running XP and added that to the home network through the wired hub/switch (no reason why you couldnt go wireless though). The pc was hidden in a cupboard out of the way and started with 2 120gb hdd's fitted. With the machine shared on the network everyone had access to all media ~movies, music, pictures, docs, plus any other files we needed stored. This worked great because kids could watch different movies in their bedrooms while i accessed files and wife was listening to music etc all in different locations around the house.
Soon i added more pc's to the home network and decided to also connect the file-server to the lounge tv so i could use it as a media player on the main screen. I also added more hdd's so it had more storage space and cleared out the whole storage cupboard of dvd's, cd's, etc giving me all the space back :banana: double bonus. Thats about the point where the old 1.2ghz reached its limits ~4 pc's watching different films at the same time, although its rare that it struggles with everyday use. However, the 'windows xp' look, icons, file browsing, ease, stability, endless easy codec upgrade, wmp11, total control, all made it impossible for these media-player gadgets to compete (especially as most have crap software look).
I have the usual remote keyboard transceiver under the tv but thats all you see, so it looks great. Everything i could ever want -simple and on demand with the use of a wireless mouse. Several hundred movies, all the music i ever need, all picture albums, blah blah.
Its so simple that even my 3 year old can turn tv over, move mouse, aim at a desktop folder with her name and click, look at all the pretty pictures (like Cars Movie, Happy Feet, Garfield etc, whatever) and click what she wants.
So while i accept these media players are useful, consider saving a cheap old pc from the scrapheap and creating your own media-file-server. Its the way forward and even microsoft believe so which is why they recently created 'MS Home-server' operating system, although this all works fine with standard xp
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