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.