The basic kit comes without a hard drive, this is great as its much cheaper to buy the hard drive you want and install it yourself, this is child's play and the instructions (if you need them) are easy to follow.
I have now had the media player for about three months and originally purchased it for £100 + £84 for a 300GB IDE drive, the price of the player has dropped to less than £85 and I'm sure the hard drives will drop / increase in size in the near future.
In essence this is both a USB hard drive which you can take anywhere with your computer for extended storage (if you have a HDD installed), when connected to a TV it becomes a Media Player capable of playing music, movies or displaying your photos.
Connect it to a network via a standard CAT 5 cable (RJ45) via a hub or into a PC and you can stream all of the above directly from and hard drive shared on the network (this makes a DVD jukebox a reality with the ever decreasing price per GB of HDD's)
Music: this is a simple case of moving to the directory where the song is stored and selecting the song or the entire directory to play, its very basic but is quick to use and does the job. If your looking for loads of playlist editors and flash backgrounds while the music is playing stick to Winamp or Microsoft Mediaplayer.
Movies: The player is capable of playing DVD's shared via a PC drive, DVD images in either ISO or VOB format, AVI's, MPG's and more. There are DIVX codecs loaded onto the device so it plays most modern file formats. You select the screen type (16:9 or 4:3) in the set-up along with HD if you have a compatible TV and sound options, if you want 5.1 or DTS you need to use an optical cable (Not provided) and if you want HD you need to use RGB cables (not provided).
Photos: Simply select the file you want and display it on the TV, its that simple.
I have had a few issues with the player, its kept freezing when playing back DTS, occasional out of sync and glitches and you cannot access the device from the network. I'm happy to say that Freecom have a firmware upgrade available that resolves most of these issues (I'm still testing as I have only just installed it)
For its money this simply is a fantastic device, when my DVD dies in the bedroom I will be replacing it with another one of these and simply stream DVD's from the computer in the study.
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