MvixUSA 760-HD Wireless Media Center Hands on Review
Well we have had some time to play around with our shiny new 760HD and we can only say, WOW! Sure its not the most creative description of our thoughts, but we were so blown away with everything this thing can do that we are left speechless.
We were expecting the typical streaming device that worked, but left us with that, meh, feeling. From the minute we plugged this sucker in we knew that there was more to this then just your run of the mill device. We had been reading up on and writing about the 760 for awhile now so we had a basic understanding of what it should be able to do, but we were excited to see how well it actually did them.
Let us break it down into some categories so we can keep our thoughts together.
Setup
OK so setup was snap. We literally plugged in the power and the Ethernet, went to the network config screen, typed in our network settings and it found all of our network storage! We were prepared to have to tinker for hours to make it see all the different media we had, but it did it right out of the box, big points there.
After that there really wasn't any setup left to do. Sure we browsed the settings to see if we could change anything( we love doing that ), and yes we did change a few things, but nothing mission critical. Mvix did a great job of making their device work out of the box and that is our number 1 thing we look for when evaluating a new device.
OK on to the actual functionality of this sucker.
Video
Currently we have all of our videos stored on a NAS box. While the 760 has the ability to have an internal hard drive installed, we didn't feel that was necessary since we had already invested a lot of time and money in setting up our honking RAID device. We were curious to see how our ripped DVD's would fair being wirelessly streamed to the 760. We went into the movie menu, browsed through our network( we are still amazed at how simple this was to get working ), found the ISO that we wanted to play and hit the play button. Within a few seconds we had the movie started on our TV and playing without skips. A large smile came across our face as we had finally achieved what we had been thinking about for so long. Ripping all of our DVD's to ISO's and playing them over the network. We literally went from unboxing to watching a streamed movie in about 20 minutes!
Music
Well for starters we should come clean and say that when we bought this device we knew that we were not going to be using it to listen to music. We have a Squeezebox already and there is no way that the 760 can compete with it. No offense to Mvix, but Slimdevices specializes in making great music streaming boxes and they have been at it for a long time. Mvix is an all in one device so some aspects of it are sure to suffer.
We played around with the music playback and it was actually very good. The interface for browsing for music was the same as the movie section was. Find your network location, find the album you want and either hit play on the album folder to play them all or hit the enter key to go in a select individual songs. You can also create playlists on your PC and have the 760 play them. Our guess is that if you bought this device and you didn't have another way to stream music in your house you would be very happy with the audio playback.
Photos
As with the other offerings of this box the photo streaming was also top notch. Like the other areas we browsed to the correct folder and we were able to see our entire photo collection. We had two options for viewing: we can hit play on the folder and view them as a slideshow or you can hit the enter button to view them one at a time. Download time over the wireless link did slow down viewing of the files, but it did not make them unwatchable. A very cool feature is the ability to play a playlist while viewing a slideshow. Anyone that is in the market for streaming photos will be happy with the performance of the 760.
Misc
One large advantage the 760 has over some other players is that there is an amazingly active community surrounding it.[mvixcommunity]. Not only that, but the developers are constantly releasing updates to the players firmware to improve the device and bring it more features. They recently just added support for NDAS which is a file transfer protocol that is supposed to allow for faster and easier transfer of files to the on board hard drive. Since we opted against having local storage on the box this option really didn't appeal to us nor could we test it out for this review. So far the addition of NDAS in the firmware has been met with lukewarm reviews. It is good to see Mvix adding features that their users are asking for so we can only assume more of the features we have been clamoring for will be added soon.
Also, they have released the code for the firmware so anyone can have a go at making their own firmware. Currently there are few user created firmwares that are floating around that offer things like telnet access to the box as well as the ability to FTP files to the internal drive.
One of the negatives we have found with the box does involve the release of new firmwares though. Like we said, our player worked right out of the box without any serious issues. We were excited to try out the latest firmware since we can't stand to leave well enough alone. Well we upgraded( a very easy process, another bonus ) and we saw improvements in menu navigation just like they said we would, except they broke Samba! We could still see the network shares, but we could no longer play and of the movies from them.
Reading the forums we discovered that they had changed the user that their Samba client logged in as and as a result broke a lot of peoples NAS connections. We are sure that this will be fix in upcoming releases, but it does stop us from upgrading for the time being.
Conclusion
So overall we feel that the 760 is an AMAZING device for a certain crowd. Even though we have stressed its easy of use and of setup, we still don't think this is suited for the mom and pop crowd. Looking at some of the other contenders out there like the AppleTV, the interface and navigation won't be easily used by a novice. If on the other hand you are a geek like us you will find this device meets just about all your needs. The movie playback ability is so far the best we have seen. With the ability to play back just about anything we have thrown at it, it trumps things like the AppleTV that are limited to playing certain filetypes.
For three hundred bucks and some change this is just a superb device that will make anyone who purchases it very happy. And with the constant updating it can only get better.
You can read our earlier review of the 760 when we had only just read about it here.
You can pick one up directly from the Mvix website here.
We will have future articles as new firmwares are released as well as a head to head of AppleTV vs. Mvix 760HD
Read More in: Audio Streaming | Hands On Review | Image Streaming | Mvix | Reviews | Video Streaming
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Posted by David Ficocello at May 30, 2007 9:00 AM
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