Sitecom Media Player 2TB MD-272 review -
The Media Player GUI
The Media Player GUI
Sitecom has been hard at work on their user interface to. The GUI is OK, decent on the eyes, less would have been better though. I find the background a little too busy with that red SITECOM logo on each and every page a little bit too much. Red is just a disturbing color for a GUI / menu.
Being in 1920x1080 you get the high-resolution look and feel of proper HTPC software like say MediaPortal. Though not extremely fast, menu responsiveness feels fast enough.
The menu is divided into Movies, Music, Photos, File Manager and Internet Media; which reminds let me swap back the GUI to English ;)
You browse your media by location or type, while Media Library indexes your files by type, date, genre or artist to name but a few.
The unit also offers on-line functionality such as Picasa, some news Feeds and Flickr. Not sure if anyone uses it, but its fun to see and play around with. You can set up and log into your personal accounts for YouTube, Flickr and Picasa, convenient.
In the setup menu you can select a plethora of options. Since the screen grabs you are looking at are actually taken with a photo-camera they unfortunately came out a little over exposed and distorted. But yeah, you get the idea.
The video settings are a little more basic. Lacking here is say a post processing feature like a little extra image sharpening or gamma. Then again the default output quality has been fine tuned for you already.
Sharp quality with razor sharp contrast and black levels. Still, a little personal tweaking we feel is always an option needed. Of course at the TV end you can and would probably want to tweak a little as well.
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 ?