This is in repsonse to the question about which media streamer I ended up buying. After a few days of researching the various products available (including networked DVD players), and after returning Hauppaugge's terrible MediaMVP, I settled on the ICube Play@TV.


I've written up a review which you can read here.

This type of device, and this device in particular, has many advantages over media PCs, namely ease of use, simplicity, lower costs, and all your media stays on your desktop PC. The downside is, of course, that you don't have as many options with what you want the device to do. You won't have web access or email, and if you don't want your media stored on your PC, that's also a downside.

For me, this is the perfect solution. I was already using myHTPC on my desktop, with a wireless video sender to get the video to another TV. This method has mostly downsides. There's a lot of little adjustments that have to be made on the PC, the video quality after sent over the air is nearly unwatchable, and I personally found the myHTPC software to be a bit buggy and frustrating.

With the Play@TV, however...well you can read my review or skip to the conclusions at the end of it. Sorry for the long, somewhat rambling review, but it was late and I wanted to get it all down. I'm sure there are a bunch of typos and things I omitted, but oh well.

As for why I picked the Play@TV over other devices, like the Prismiq, well the Prismiq is probably the other device I'd like, though with the rebate you can get from ICube, the Play@TV is down to $144 as opposed to $199 for the Prismiq. All the other devices I've seen just didn't get the whole thing right. Not one bit. Some of the networked DVD players are pretty good, but if you already have a DVD player, then spending around $500 on this type of device doesn't make much sense.

Anyway, there's my opinion. I strongly recommend the Play@TV.

That is a great review you should send a link to play@tv

Does the music app let you insert and append ?

Thanks!

Well, I'm not sure. I don't think so, though. I think that, unfortunately, any playlist alterations need to be made on the PC side, but I'll check on that.

*edit*
There doesn't appear to be any insert/append option. Sorry about that. It doesn't bother me any, because I only listen to full albums at a time anyway.

Your review says it has component outputs, but doesn't mention whether the box speaks HD. Can it do 1080i or 720p?

Likewise, for the music section, is there any integration with iTunes? Ideally, I'd like something that could speak Rendezvous with iTunes and present me a full UI to see my tunes and play them in whatever order.

When I listen to full albums I like to que up the next one.

The biggest reason I want insert and append is I like to listen to a shuffle of several artists and don't want to make a playlist ahead of time.

Also many times when I am listening to an album I will suddenly want to head a particular song so insert is nice for that.

I'm gonna guess no Link


Did you see the one David got Link

I think he's right, and that it won't do HD. That would require an awful lot of hard disk space on the desktop system anyway, and the amount of information going over the network would be huge, wouldn't it? I'm not sure you're going to find many of these that will do that.

And no, I doubt it will speak to iTunes.

I realize that HD video might be a bit much to ask from a device like this, but it would seem reasonable to have HD for displaying still images (like the Roku does). But, once you put an HD chipset inside, the materials cost goes up significantly. I bet you could do 480p (same as a progressive DVD player) with cheap parts, though.

All I know is that photos look fantastic already, HD or not. Like I said in the review, when you zoom into a portion of the screen, and it's filling the whole 16:9 set, it's really impressive. Also, it's not like this looks like when you put analog video out on a video card to a TV or something. I've done that, and it looks pretty bad. Screen flicker, wrong colors, even bad geometry are the things I usually see from a setup like that. This has none of those issues. There is no screen flicker.

The only way HD could make it look any better for me is if I had a better camera. I don't think my G2 can take anything that would benefit from the display