Thought this might fit the bill since I have, and have enjoyed, one of the original Xtreamer products, which they don't make anymore.The main company is in Europe somewhere, but their US website is awful. It's barebones and they are always "out of stock" even though you can find most of their stuff on Amazon, and cheaper. I just don't understand why they have such a poor presence in the US when their products have so much potential.
This device is supposed to be able to use an iPod to stream music and video to your TV, but I just wanted to get something that would take a standard hard drive with a large capacity and has a good interface to play back movies and shows. The one promising thing about the company is they do have a good, quick easy to use interface to select and manage your digital stuff. This particular model has a much better remote than the one I had before. I really liked the POTENTIAL this device has, but it failed one some basic levels.
Hard drive there is a slot on the side to slide in a standard 1TB hard drive, but you have to attach it to some plastic rails and the click it into place. Not bad, but when I tried to take the HD out, it's impossible. You really have to pry it back out. And getting it in the first time, I really had to wedge it in there before the drive would connect with the SATA pins inside the Xtreamer.
Ethernet port didn't work. That's why I sent it back. I wanted to be able to get this device on the network so I can add content to it w/o having to go wireless. I know everyone is crazy about wireless these days, but it's not nearly as fast nor as reliable as a good old ethernet connection over some Cat5 or some Cat6. Bt the ethernet port on the one I got never lit up. I tried to different routers and two different switches along with several different patch cables, and the lights indicating a connection never came on.
Additional: when I had an ethernet cable connected and then tried connecting the USB master cable from my computer, I would see the NIC card lights come on for a moment and then go off. Also, when I had this setup connected to my media center a Panasonic Viera with an Onkeo receiver and DirecTV setup this device would prevent the TV from turning off when I shut down the receiver. With a Viera, the tv will detect when the receiver goes on, which routes all of my HDMI enabled devices, and turn itself on or off. So I can have my DTV remote turn on the satellite, which turns on the receiver which turns on the TV, and vice versa when I turn things off. With this Xtreamer plugged in, the tv and the receiver would not shut down. Obviously some kind of wiring fault in the device. This was never true with the previous Xtreamer model I had.
So I took this faulty thing out, packed it up and sent it back to Amazon. Thanks, Amazon, for making things so easy when it comes to returning faulty devices.
In the meantime, I spent another $50 and got the Micca 350 Gen 2 which works very well. Out of the box, it was easier to setup, put a new hard drive in and start transferring videos. The remote on the Micca isn't as nice as the Xtreamer, but the main thing is the device works well and satisfires my needs w/o the feeling that I just bought a piece of junk.
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