Mediagate MH-450HD Media Streamer Gets Mixed Reviews
Well
Mediagate has launched another media streamer and it looks like they have been building on their
past successes and making their latest unit one of their best looking one to date. The 450HD is in that class of streamers that allow you to either add an internal hard drive, connect a USB disk to it or have it stream from your network. We like the idea of having the internal drive as long as getting content to and from it is easy. We like to keep all of our media central so we would never store it all on the internal drive, but we like the idea of putting a few things there if we wanted to take it with us.
From looking over the specs it is fairly limited in the way in which it will connect up to your entertainment center. It only has Component, Composite and S-Video for video which might make some people unhappy. If you are going to put HD in your product name people are going to expect HDMI these days. Here is the weird thing though, we went and looked at probably a dozen online reviews of this thing and they all mention that it has HDMI, even a press release we read said this. Yet when we go to the companies site and read the
specs HDMI is not listed and the
picture they show of the device does not have a HDMI port on it. So either the companies site is out of date or everyone just read the press release and assumed it had it. Who knows, all we know is that someone is right and someone is wrong and we have no idea who it is.
Anyway, onto what this can do and not what it may or may not be missing. There is a very well down hands on review over at
PC World Australia that basically concludes that while this has some nice features there are plenty of warts to make you want to move on to
another product. Even though it is billed as a high def player they say that the menu system was designed with a standard def TV in mind since when they had it on a HDTV the menus looked horrible. They also had some big complaints about the wireless setup being a nightmare.
That is the blown-up and over exposed image we made from the little one on the Mediagate website. If anyone can find the HDMI port there please let us know, cause unless we are crazy, it ain't there.
The Mediagate 450HD has fairly limited file type support:
Audio
Video
- AVI
- VOB
- WMA v9
- ASF
- DivX
- MPEG-2
- MPEG-4
- WMV
- Xvid
Photo
Basically while this is probably Mediagate's best effort to date it still lacks a lot of the polish that you would expect from a device like this. There is always hope that future firmware updates can fix some of the biggest problems. With this selling for $249 and set to be released soonish we would a have a hard time recommending this to the casual user. We're sure that the hard core media streaming enthusiast would have a lot of uses for this and also jump on the hacking bandwagon when it inevitably launches soon after this is released. For that kind of money you are better served going for
Popcorn Hour's Networked Media Tank.
via
engadget
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Posted by David Ficocello at February 27, 2008 8:32 PM
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