The growing antagonism between Google / You Tube and the creators, who involuntarily "supply" their video content has shown that the PC is the place to go to watch videos now. So it would be nice if all of your huge video and music files can stash a place other than the hard drive of your computer? And if such a body could easily be plugged into your living room TV and stereo, so you can watch the videos and listen to music without having to integrate a PCYour living room stack of equipment? And would not it be nice if you can use a wireless connection to move these files from your PC because you can not or do not want in your living room with an Ethernet cable?
These questions are not empty, but the idea behind the $ 275 MediaGate MG-350HD. It is the size of a hardback book with lots of cables and connectors to hook up to your TV and hifi. It sorta works.
http://www.Mediagateusa.com
The box has your choice of component, composite,S-video or DVI video connectors and coaxial cable, optical or two RCA audio ports. With this selection, the combination should it hook, you can have in your living room. Unlike with a Media Center PC, it is quiet and does not generate much heat.
You can connect it to your PC either via a standard USB port, or you can use either the wired or wireless Ethernet network ports. It does not work with every hard drive will - you need to buy an older model, 3.5-inch IDE drive.(It would have been nicer if they have a SATA interface, especially since these drives are pretty cheap now included.) After starting four cover screws, you can get in touch with the IDE drive in the box and plug it then format again, power and hard drive. There are instructions that are written in poorly translated English for different versions of Windows, how to do this.
The good news is that the box just enough intelligence to save all kinds of video files that I have a gripit. I asked my 20-step-son to give you something to try me a sample of video downloads to. One of them came with German subtitles, was a Babel of a version without subtitles (which is hard, there's not much dialogue in English), and a more or less like the theatrical release did. None of these were ordinary files at once on a Windows PC to play games without installing any further audio or video encoder, such as Divx. All ran like it just fine on the MediaGate.
The bad news is that theWireless and network support is still has some way to work. To use the MediaGate as a network storage device, you need a special driver on your Windows PC to install. It was easier to plug in the USB cable and move the files on his hard drive, which appears somewhat defeats the idea behind a network storage. I have configured WEP on my home network, and I was not the appropriate button to cope with the MediaGate working in spite of its alleged support for this level of encryption.
TheDevice will play with a small remote control that is used primarily for setup tasks, and to scroll through the various files to it. And do you scroll - the interface is similar to Windows Media Center to display folder and file names on the screen in large fonts, which represent only a few listings per screen. If you have hundreds of files, it is still some effort to find them. Another cool feature is that you can store video and audio files to normal USB sticks, and then they get stuck inthe unit and play them.
Both audio and video quality seemed acceptable. You have your choice of 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratios of the video. Overall, the device does a decent job. If you aren’t a fan of Windows Media Center, this might be a good alternative. Apple’s iTV is comparably priced when you factor into the fact that it includes the hard drive but not the cables. But iTV doesn’t do 4:3 and you need to use iTunes to manage how the content gets moved over to the box.
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