Sitecom Media Player 2TB MD-272 review -
Product Showcase
Here we have the HDD TV Media Player 2TB MD-272, a very cute dark colored box. Once powered on or off it will show a red power on button. Though the design itself is fine.
At the front there is furthermore a infrared receiver and two USB ports. Obviously you could plug in a USB stick with photo's, music or movies and play that back on the media player. The USB port can also be used to flash the device with a new firmware.
The backside of the HDD TV Media Player 2TB MD-272 is well equipped with connectivity. This is a 200 EUR device (with 2TB HDD) yet you get a very decent feature set. We can see the power-connector (adapter included of course), a 10/100/1000 Mbit Ethernet jack that you can plug into your local network (that's how you access your content).
Then we see a HDMI 1.3a connector, ideally you hook it to an AV receiver that will decode the multi-channel audio and then pass through the TV/video signal towards your telly. There are four RCA connectors for component and composite video output, as well as two for left/right stereo channels should you require analog audio. Even digital TOSLINK and Coaxial SPDIF outputs are present.
When we flip the unit around we can see that there is no easy way to access the HDD. The bottom side shows nothing out of the ordinary, some meshes for ventilation and clearly a mesh for the cooling fan. This model by the way is significantly more noisy than its predecessors. Nothing irritating, but you can definitely hear the unit. All competitors have this 'issue' as well.
Ah well, screwdrivers behold.
So once we open up the device (relatively simple with four screws) we can access the HDD. Should you ever want to swap it out, open it up, pop it out and replace it with another model. These are regular 3.5" HDDs so that's very convenient.
The Sitecom Powerline Ethernet adapters allow you to use your mains electricity circuit to transfer data, this way you can extend your network to wherever you have a free plug socket. The product we test today comes from Sitecom, their 500 Mbps plus Homeplug. The kit provides a connection of up to 500Mbits/sec. Divide that by 8 bits and you'd in theory would be able to see transfer speeds of 62.5 Megabyte per second. In practice, however we tested the maximum net data rate is much MUCH lower, 60~100 Mbits/sec - still that is faster than Wi-Fi and sufficient fenough or streaming high-definition video from say your PC with network shares to, for instance, your HTPC.
Sitecom Media Player 2TB MD-272 review
So the new Sitecom Media Player comes standard with a new improved GUI, but also hardware wise harbor the latest Realtek 1185 chipset, and that changes a thing or two as pretty much any of the performance issues we had noticed in 1080P content playback (with very high bit-rate) on the previous chipset now are a thing of the past. That Realtek 1185 chipset has an increased clock frequency, 500 MHz coming from 400 MHz on the original version. And as little as it sounds, it makes a serious difference. The HDD TV Media Player 2TB allows you to play digital films, music and photos directly on your TV with High Definition quality (1080p).
Sitecom 300N X4 WLR-4000 Wireless router review
Sitecom introduces a series of standard routers but with a twist. They tagged their mainstream range from X1, X2, X3 and a more enthusiast range from X4, X5 and X6. They are all Gigabit models, but obviously the higher the number the better the feature set. all models now come with cloud security, and that's the new feature we'll discuss later on. We test the X4 WLR-4000 model.
Sitecom MD-500 Digital Media Set review
One of the kits Sitecom recently introduced consists out of a Gigabit router for your intra and local area network connectivity, a storage unit which Sitecom calls 'Home Storage center' will function as NAS server for all your multi-media content like photo's, music and movies. And then a small all-in-one HTPC or TV media player as we like to call it these days. To top things off they throw in a Logitech Harmony 650 universal remote control. Aren't you just eager to see how this HTPC network platform will perform ?