Media Library

Music, photos, videos of any kind from any source. Till this moment I have tested the Xtreamer for many hours in sleepless nights. I currently could not find any (common) media file which it could not handle. Not a surprise for MP3s or JPG images though but it could even play a 33GB BluRay ISO file from a Windows Share without any problems!

In the following tests, the Xtreamer will have to prove itself on video files which are for common day usage for us normal people with normal FullHD LCD or plasma TVs. By "normal" i mean a home cinema setup which does not compete to high end demonstration rooms in media markets for tens of thousands of €uros but a 32" - 52" LCD/LED TV in a living room where you sit on a sofa 3-6 meters away from the screen and where the sound is coming out of usual 5.1 or 7.1 speakers fed by an AV receiver. Let's see how the Xtreamer will do this job.

While you are reading, please remember that the results are based on my personal experience. I'm not a specialist in the mediaplayer field but I love to play with these kind of gadgets any technology in general.

I'll try to keep the results up to date along with the latest available public firmware versions. I will mainly re-test videos which had problems, coz let's be a little optimistic here: if a video plays smooth in a specific firmware it should also play smooth in later firmwares, otherwise the developers are doing something wrong :)

By the way, I remember I asked the admins in the forums, if the Xtreamer could aggregate all media files from at least all external hard disks (connected via USB 2.0 hub) into one media library (indexing) so you would get a big list of all your movies. But as far as I can tell for myself, there is no indexing feature yet, not even in the current v2.1.3 firmware. The library works like the "folder view" on the WDTV: you can browse each single hard disk, USB stick, or whatever you have connected to the device but there is no "big" indexed list which has all media files that have been found on the drives.

But... we are now in January 2010 and there is something cooking: they have already presented a concept for the new firmware v3.x branch to a closed group of people. It looks really promising! According to the admins the new version will have a jukebox integrated with a search and indexing feature. We can expect ithe new firmware to be released in March 2010. I'm looking forward! Let's hope they will finish the development soon so tat we we will get to see some new surprises, I am sure the Xtreamer has still a lot of secrets hidden inside :)