WholeHome

So you have a movie collection – where it came from and the subtleties of what you can and cannot do with your huge DVD collection is your business – but you have a big collection. Cool, but being stuck watching it on just one TV or having to hook up a windows media center and netowrk in a bunch of slaves is a real pain – so how do the “rest of us” do it?

Yep, there is, in fact, a marriage made in heaven – an Xtender (to get your collection all over your home) and a media player. Check out the HDX1000 from Amperor Direct http://www.amperordirect.com/pc//audiovideo-HDX_1000.html  Yeah you could pay hundreds up to about $2000 on a media center and all you need to play movies, or just hook up this $249 device to a portable or internal hard drive and you are set. It plays pretty much any file type codec I’ve seen – even media center recordings, VOBs, and Xvid/DivX, comes with a really snazzy interface, and pretty much makes you look like the high tech cool guy on the block even if you aren’t.

I’ve been using one of these on one of my spare Xtender channels for a couple months and it really works well. The one I have gives me internet connectivity to news/video sites, lets me download torrents, and plays all my digital collections.  I’ll provide a detailed writeup on how these two work together in a soon-to-come blog update, but wanted everyone to be aware of this product.

Let me briefly run through the leaders and what I’ve seen so far:

Media Centers:

Pros – very versatile, easily updated codecs, unlimited storage as you can always add more, nice integration to online video rental sites

Cons – uh – it’s Windows, it crashes, it eventually becomes unstable, did I say it’s Windows already?

WD-TV

Pros – Low cost ~$100, pretty good codec stack, simple interface – intuitive

Cons – one USB port so storage is limited, no clear way to network storage, VOBs play kind-of (you have to play each chapter manually and frankly that sucks)

HDX1000

Pros – Reasonable cost, excellent codec coverage, excellent online uses, torrent integration – very cool, multiple USB ports AND internal drive bay, easily NAS’d

Cons – My humble opinion is that the user interface coule use a little updating, page up/dn, jump or fast search etc. but upgrades come all the time

Dlink/Linksys/Other Media center/expanders

I’m from the wireless industry and it truly is my first love, but running a bunch of video around the home wirelessly just don’t fly – and I don’t know many folks to have ethernet at every TV in the home, or are willing to invest in a new $250+ box for every TV so I’m not going to even bother with the pro/con list for these.

Watch for the under the hood review of the HDX1000 -