August 19, 2005
Streamers
There are a whole bunch of streamers on the market, as I predicted some 8-10 months ago, the hot product for christmas is video and everybody wants to get the media they have been busily encoding onto the pc back off and play through the TV or the hifi.
well that's where this beauty comes in and it really is a lovely player, with only one major fault - but we will get to that in a moment. Firstly it has a nicely integrated, remoted driven user interface, this means you have a great TV like experience for browsing your photos or selecting which album you want to play.
The LinkTheatre supports a huge range of formats including DivX, WMA, WMV, WMV-HD etc.. It plays out as either standard definition or HD TV, and it has a bunch of USB ports on the front for you thumb drives.
But that shoppers is not all - no this little hottie comes with 802.11g WiFi (Grrrr - I hear you all say) yes it really does whip in and discover all your media just the way the media centre PC promised it would and all for only approx $449 AUD.
So whats wrong with it??? well the only thing I could find is that there is no published support for AAC and that means all the music I have encoded using iTunes is pretty useless. So this particular box is not the one for me but it is a great jump in the right direction.
- damm just posted this and went back to re-read all of the formats it supports, and would you believe it does fully support AAC and M4A so there is no reason not to whip out and buy one for $449 it also includes a DVD player - what more do you need?
Posted by crispin at August 19, 2005 12:49 AM