7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a wonderful idea, June 1, 2009
This review is from: MediaGate MG-800HD 3.5" HDD 1080p wireless N Media Player (Electronics)
When I first opened the box to this product, I knew this was a quality item. Then I opened the owners manual and I knew that I was on my own for any setup and technical issues, and this was confirmed when I sneeaked a look at the MediaGate site and saw that their idea of technical support was to post in a forum. I'm a computer nerd, so I wasn't scared, but if you are not a computer nerd, don't expect to be able to easily set this up or solve any problems that come up.
After setting it up, I played every type of media file I could find on my computer as a test of it's ability. It performed very well. I was even able to wirelessly stream video from an external USB hard drive without any glitches! One of only three issues I found while doing this was with large WAV files, which would play halfway through and then stop. I'm not sure why that is, but I also do not have the latest firmware version installed yet. Then there was the issue with certain VOB files, since MediaGate detected the english subtitles but did not detect the chinese subtitles. Finally there was the issue with the Server window, which if you tried to resize, would snap into a fixed size. This worked fine on my WinXP laptop, but made some application controls inaccessible on my WinVista desktop. I thought about changing my screen resolution from 2560x1600 to something smaller and trying to resize it again so that it would snap to a new size, but I haven't tried that yet. I consider all these issues to be minor problems that can eventually be worked around, so I'm not going to complain too loudly, since I am very happy with everything else.
So while I would recommend this product to any hi-tech gadget freak or computer enthusiast, if you are not already a computer nerd, I would recommend finding one before trying to set this up.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Just Not Worth the $300, April 24, 2009
This review is from: MediaGate MG-800HD 3.5" HDD 1080p wireless N Media Player (Electronics)
As I write this, I have to tell you I am a huge Mediagate fan. I have had the MG-25 for over 3 years and love it. It does exactly what it purports to do with little or no grief, and certainly has it's shortcomings but for the price point of the product is, in my opinion, a great value.
So after a friend's glowing review I was really looking forward to deploying the MG-800HD in my network and solving a persistent problem of getting my UPNP server content to my HDTV without file copies and the like.
I ordered this unit and a WD Caviar Green 500GB hard drive and proceeded to build it, loading the latest firmware from Mediagate in the process. There are a lot of cool features like web browsing built into the latest firmware and although I am skeptical that people are going to buy this thing to hook up a KVM and surf the web, it is nice to see they are adding functionality.
Things that worked well:
-Streaming capability from a UPNP source (painless)
-Wireless setup fast and easy, even for WPA2 network
-Good format support (as expected)
-Remote has good range and is laid out fairly well
-Lots of ways to access your content (network, USB, local HD if installed)
Things that did not work well:
-UI experience is cheap and unpolished
-Wireless transfer of files using device as a repository very flakey
-System stability issues/lockups/freezes
Unfortunately, I had several problems with NAS performance over wireless that doesn't occur with other devices I operate on my network. Random dropouts, the inability to copy even moderately-large files without hangups, and having to hard reset the system to get it to recognize the new files at times.
In the final analysis, I liked some of what was provided with this device, but needless to say, I promptly sent it back. A device this expensive needs to slam dunk all of the features and for me, my $300 was better spent elsewhere.
If you have a slingbox at home, I would highly suggest looking at the Slingcatcher instead of this device. With the latest firmware update it does almost everything this device does (sans the local hard drive) and gets it done in a much more elegant, polished way. Add to that the Sling capability and it was a slam dunk for me. You can have that plus a wireless bridge solution for ~$260.00USD.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
MediaGate 800-HD, November 5, 2009
This review is from: MediaGate MG-800HD 3.5" HDD 1080p wireless N Media Player (Electronics)
Really like this product. Very easy to setup and get running. Comes with Wi-Fi but for downloading movies to the hard drive or streaming from your computer the wired networking workes the best.
The unit doesn't come with a Hard drive but one should be ordered. SATA
Have yet to find a website that streaming is compatable with the unit.
Also the web browser is a little clunky.
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