June 6, 2007

TViX HD M-5100SH Digital Media Server

The HD M-5100SH is the latest offering from TViX in there media streamer line. This bad boy attempts to do it all. Just looking at the ability to playback 1080p signals over HDMI, it bests most other consumer media streamers, and that is just the beginning. It packs a high speed Serial ATA drive inside to store your movies on and has an Ethernet port to use your home computer for more storage.

It can handle just about any format you throw at it including:

Video

WMV
WMV HD
AVI
MPG
VOB
MP4
ASF

Audio

MP3
WMA
AAC
FLAC
OGG
PCM
M4A

You can output these files to your TV via:

HDMI
Component
S-Video
Composite

Another nice feature that this player sports is the ability to playback H.264 encoded files. Looking around at other players and what people usually complain about is the lack of H.264 support. Love it or hate it, H.264 is gaining more and more ground as the format of choice for compressed movies.

TViX decided to go with the Sigma EM8623 processor which we think was a very smart decision. A lot of devices out there choose to use the EM8621L which can't handle H.264. TViX went with the beefier model which opens up a lot of possibilities, not only for now, but for future expansion.

Overall we think this is an excellent product and one that will make a lot of people happy. We have been keeping our eye on products coming out of TViX and this is another one where they listened to what people wanted and delivered.

Hopefully we can get our hands on one of these to test it out for you. Until then we can only drool over what is a sweet product and one that would go nicely with our already crowded entertainment center :)

You can pick one up here if you are interested.

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