Blimey, this is so *nearly there*... but what it needs is that little push to make it worth more than the sum of its parts. Can you put a price on reducing the number of boxes and remotes?
Nice review, but like mentioned above does seem to be missing some basic specs. eg. How many Tuners does this have, if it was just a single then that would be a real shame. Whats the GFX card, if its a Gefore 8 series and above, the purevideo decoder gives some really nice up-scaling.
To answer your questions, John has asked Vivadi for more details on the processor and graphics card so we'll update the spec table as soon as it arrives.
John also states in the review that the MM200 is 'nothing short of exemplary when it comes to accessing, storing and playing back multimedia files' - a comment intended to cover its streaming capabilities. Apologies if this wasn't obvious enough.
It has two Freeview tuners.
And finally, regarding fan noise, while the MM200 runs very noisily for a few seconds when you first turn it on, it calms down to ultimately not being substantially noisier than a Sky HD receiver. It's certainly no Xbox 360, at any rate...
Hmmm, looks like one of Hiper's HTPC cases, but rebranded. Oh wait, it is!
I built an earlier model for a friend, and would do it again in a second if I had the cash to replace my old shuttle system. Beware of that top vent though, the one I built died after whisky seeped through and met with the motherboard.
Incredibly cramped and tricky to put together, so a ready-built unit is ideal!
Great review, I think this is the closest any chassis has come to fitting into the living room alongside dvd players.
Strange - was only saying to a mate yesterday that I thought we'd be seeing dvd player sized (well, ish....) computer/media player/freeview box/pvr/everything soon.
I reckon these will be very popular, very quickly. Now if windows 7 media center ups the ante, then could be on a winner. (Wonder how well the new windows version of XBMC would work on this...)
"John also states in the review that the MM200 is 'nothing short of exemplary when it comes to accessing, storing and playing back multimedia files' - a comment intended to cover its streaming capabilities. Apologies if this wasn't obvious enough."
Not so much a case of how obvious the statement was, more that it wasn't very meaningful. It'd have been useful to know for instance what media was streamed (audio, video, hd?) and how (wifi or wired, what receiver was used, etc).
This may well be a fantastic piece of kit you could use as a media server to provide content to your whole house, or it might just be a reasonably nice windows Media Centre box like a number of others. Right now, I've not got a scooby which it is.
I've had the same feeling too - but it may not be windows pcs under the tellys - many of the top end PVRs just need iplayer, web function and they are there as well.
Alternatively Sony will do the obvious (or smart) thing and incorporate the PVR function they currently sell as an add-on for the PS3 into the next hardware revision of the PS3 (and hopefully make it look more like a DVD player but with the build quality of the current ps3).
Also Apple could do something more bold with the Mac Mini.
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