OK, I just keep on keeping on putting off modding an old Xbox to use as a media director (not server–it only has a 40GB hard drive). So sue me. This may well be the lazy tightwad’s (well, this lazy tightwad’s) answer to the need for a media server:
The Digital Entertainer Live (DE Live) is a compact HD TV media player that connects directly to your TV and home media. Now you can access your digital media collection stored on your computer and storage devices, and enjoy it directly on your TV.
DE Live features two USB 2.0 ports that connect directly to external USB storage devices, and an Ethernet port that connects to your home network, so you can access the Internet, computers, and network attached storage devices, such as the NETGEAR® ReadyNASTM Duo. The Digital Entertainer Live also features an HDMI port that connects directly to your HD TV or regular RCA jacks for connecting to older analog TVs.
Now, that sounds just about right for our MOR media usage patterns. And it might be just the thing to move me off TDC in selecting both a new TV and a NAS (network attached storage) solution. In the mean time, it’ll attach to our old, fairly large analog TV, and I have a router that’ll accept a large USB drive attached, so I can emulate a NAS… and even attach a couple of drives I have laying around directly to the unit. Until the NAS is in place, could just keep different media on different drives (and all backed up elsewhere, of course) as well as making a separate “media” folder on my hosted account available. It wouldn’t be as organizationally tight as having all the stuff on one media server but it’d at least work. For us. (And, I like Netgear stuff, so for me that’s a plus.)
Yeh, yeh: one more “clicker” to keep track of… *heh*
Looks VERY interesting… need to dig a little deeper.
Yeh, Woody, this has gone in my “investigate further, maybe actually put it on The List” pile.
Pile’s getting a bit deep, though, so I’ve gonna have to crack open the piggy bank soon… comes hard to a tightwad. 🙂
Hmmm… so it can only stream if one of your PC’s hosting the media is turned on. So if my Den PC was off or hibernating I’d have to go down in the basement before I could use this…
I’d probably want to add a NAS device then, so the price of this just went up by $200-300.
Methinks a Zino PC would be a better choice for my Living Rm. PC needs.
Well, doesn’t everybody have a few external drives hanging off computers nowadays, Woody? I count four hanging off this “Hawg” I’m on now (with two more inside). Archive the data on one “in the cloud” and on optical media, and have 500GB free for media-only storage to attach directly to the device, with media dumped onto it over the network on a regular basis? Could be pretty easy at that.
Or just make sure WOL (Wake On LAN) is enabled on the computer you’d need to access.
Oh, and were I to want to add an external terabyte drive, it’d cost at most around $150. About $125 for the drive and another $25 for an external case. Assembly time: 5 minutes. Format and partition: another 5-15, depending on just how much work I’d want to do on it. Ready-made external drives or NAS devices are not for even Zeta Geeks. *heh* BUT, if that’s the way you’d want to go, here’s a 1.5 terabyte Seagate FreeAgent external drive for $140–with shipping. Heck, even I might forgo assembling one for that kind of price. Might. This WD 1.5TB drive for $120 might be a better deal overall–for me. Heck, I even have an external case I could pop it into (that was only about $25). I’d end up having about $5 more in the thing, but it’d be worth it to me for the “tinkering time” play.
I do have to admit that the Zino looks pretty cool… except for the fact that it’s from Dull computers (I’ve had LOTS of calls on failed Dull computers–failed from parts replaced multiple times under warranty that then failed AFTER the warranty expired. Dull computers don’t appeal to me much. YMMV, of course.)