Sitecom Media Player 2TB MD-272 review - Introduction

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 11/08/2011 03:00 PM [

SiteCom Home Living MediaPlayer

SiteCom HDD TV Media Player 2TB MD-272

There are many media players available in the stores, and for good reason. These handy devices can play pretty much any media format you grab from the web. Whether these are photo's, music or media like movies. For anywhere in-between 100 to 200 EUR you can purchase a box that manages it all, and even with an HDD included. Media Players as such have become a huge competing factor against even the most expensive HTPCs, dedicated to just that. These little critters just need say 15~20 Watts and a small investment money wise, to achieve some impressive stuff.

A good year and a half ago we already reviewed a Media Player setup from Sitecom's smart living series. Back then 1080P was not yet where it is these days, and as such their media players could use an upgrade with improved GUI but most of all giving it more horsepower to deal with the latest high-bit rate content.

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).

The unit we have at hand can play files stored on its the built-in 2TB 3.5" hard disk or we can simply stream it from elsewhere in our network

With the MD-272 being DLNA certified as well can detect and connect other UPnP A/V devices (Universal Plug and Play Audio and Video) in the network. The MD-272 comes with one USB host port for transferring data from a computer to the internal hard disk and two USB ports that can be used for things like an (optional) USB wireless network adapter and a USB storage device

Fun stuff alright, just as nice is the warranty as Sitecom offers a ten year warranty on this product. And that seems very impressive. Let's head on over into the review shall we ?

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Sitecom 500 Mbps homeplug Ethernet review
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).

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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 ?