I have been lurking/procrastinating for a while now on buying a media player. May I please have your opinions on what the Best player would be. I don't care about networking. Whatever I do will include a usb connected HardDrive. I have a wide range of codecs I have used. I'm not interested in something that will play all of them but most would be nice. Money no object. So far I have only looked at Seagate theaters, WD movie-box, and Popcorn Hour stuff. I will consider anything though. I've looked at these and I don't know the WD models. Seagate: GoFlex TV STAJ100 HD Media Player STCEA101-RK theater stcea201-rk THANKS!
Am also looking. Anything considered, even thouse ones where the hard drive just sticks straight out of the top! Looking for cheapness and goodness (goodness being playing as many formats as possible in as high res as possible), and preferably something that will take a Samsung F4 2TB drive or other 2TB drive. I remember a couple of years ago it used to be quite clear which ones were good and they all seemed to be around £30, cheap. Now it seems more confusing and some of them are around £100 without a drive, not sure why.. ?
A usb input is far better than a drive since you can put a drive into a box with a usb port. You want a device that can play the formats you have. The cost has a lot to do with what the players can play. I doubt that we will get any advice since the original request is over 60 days old. The good ones are in the 100 pound range so care is needed when spending that much money. I will do some checking over the next month. I have 2 friends that have good systems and both would have shopped long and hard before spending any money. I will post their recommendations when I get around to getting any info.
I understand the versatility of one with a usb input (they pretty much all have usb input anyway) but someone has asked me to get them one and they specifically said they want the player and storage all in one physical unit, with the option to plug in additional drives if required.
I think what you want is a Patriot Box Office. It has 3 USB ports and you can put a 2.5" drive inside. This player will play almost anything out there and it is often on sale. I recently got my mother to get one and it works well the only downfall I can give it is the UI is not the nicest looking but it does what it claims to do and it does it well.
I have a AC Ryan Playon Mini. If you want to enjoy movies without any motion artifacts, than I would suggest getting one with a HDD inside. The transfer rate when using a USB suffers abit. But I would think that the transfer rate in the new media players with USB 3.0 would be better .
The WDTV live is a good player, but there are loads of cheap and cheerful models, FUTEKO do a good range, but you can pick up a player now, that plays everything for under 40 Euros/50 dollars on EBAY, 1080P playback, DD5.1/DTS out, want to stream then you can look at the cyclone players or the WDTV live, I use a WDTV Gen 1, no probs with it plays everything I have thrown at it, just be aware that header compression will and can impact players, you can download MKVFIX and this fixs it in seconds,
