May 8, 2007

AL Tech Mediagate MG-35

The MediaGate MG-35 from AL Tech is one of the new line of multimedia HD enclosures. Now of course our favorite of this segment of the industry is the MvixUSA 760HD, but we are excited to see more and more of these hit the market.

The MG-35 is one of the second generations of enclosures that offers an Ethernet port so you can access your files remotely without having to have a USB cable strung between your computer and the device. The point of buying a media center is to have your main computer our of the way. Who wants to have to keep taking the media center to the PC, connecting via USB, transferring files to it, then moving it back to your TV. By adding an Ethernet port you are now able to pull all the data you want over your network leaving your PC and media center where they are.

Ok so enough of that, what can this sucker do, well lets look at the formats it can handle:

Video

MPEG 1
MPEG 2
MPEG 4
DivX 3.11 and higher
XviD

Audio

MP3
OGG Vorbis
WMA

Image

JPEG

Looking at that list you can see that it doesn't offer the bevy of formats that the 760 does, but it is a pretty good list, good enough for most people. We like the inclusion of OGG as an audio format, but aren't happy that they didn't add support for FLAC.

The list of video formats is adequate. Supporting DivX was a good decision as more and more content is being found in DivX.

For images it seems to only support JPEG which is a curious decision since just about every other device supports at least GIF and PNG also, so we aren't sure why they decided to stick with just JPEG, but thats what they did.

Reviews have been pretty positive so we would see this as a good low end entry into the home media market. Maybe you just want to test the waters and see if this streaming media thing is for you, but don't want to fork over 300 or more dollars for one of the better devices. You can pick this up for pretty short money over at Amazon.

We'll keep you posted if we manage to get one in house for testing.

via I4U

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