CiragoTV Platinum CMC3200 Network HD Multimedia Center with a 2 TB HD and Built-In Card Reader for

I have had this for about 4 months now and believe I have found any flaws that may exist with it. But first the good. It plays anything, I have over 2 TB in movies with files of every type. I have not ran across anything that won't play. I pull from a NAS and over a domain with authentication and it works fine in this environment. Have used wireless (n) and wired with no lag in video. I have used a USB drive to play movies from and copy movies from to my NAS all very effortlessly. I use the 2TB drive on it to backup other files from my network as I have the NAS for a file sharing resource I have no need for the space onboard. I have tried to record TV and it works good enough but really it's not a feature I am interested in so it does not get used much. The design of the box looks good but also has an out of the way appearance to it. I use it every day to watch movies on or play music through and I am happy with it. I have used this to replace out an Archos 5 with a docking station and going from that to this has been a very good experience as the Archos was VERY temperamental and it would lock up just by looking at it and it finally died via HD that was proprietary to the device. I have not had this Caraigo lock up, not even once as some of you may know that it can really spoil a nice movie night and is very important to me. I also have not used this for any web based features like youtube.com I see the advantage of this being on the TV but the remote would make surfing the web agonizing. It does not generate too much heat or noise though you can hear the HD spin up from time to time.

Now the bad. As mentioned earlier the remote, were to begin. It's a very bad design I have gotten use to it but it really is no good. It needs a keyboard for a device like this to make all the tasks quicker like typing in file names and logging into resources on a secure domain. It's one of those remotes that you have to aim directly at the device or it will not work. The buttons are poorly designed and need to be rethought. The play, pause, stop buttons (which you use the most) are very small and insignificant looking. Almost like there a feature that will not be used that much. It takes some time to get use to this. The caraigo displays the current directory in a narrow view so you can't see the whole file name. You have no way to go straight to a file by searching or selecting a letter to take you to that section. FFwd and Rewind are only in steps of 32x so it can take some time to get to the middle of a movie if you want. If you are interested in recording TV it will not record in HiDef as it only has RCA in to the Caraigo.

I have two of these and am happy with them. I would buy them again if given the chance, though I would like to give the WD version a go as well to see how it compares. I would recommend these to my less technical friends as I feel it is easy enough to use and versatile enough to fit most needs. If they would fix the remote I would give this a 5 star.

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