I just posted the article Introduction to buying Media Players.
Differences in media players: which one to buy? Read the article to discover the differences!
Read the full article here: [http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/14724-Introduction-to-buying-Media-Players/](http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/14724-Introduction-to-buying-Media-Players/)
Feel free to add your comments below.
Please note that the reactions from the complete site will be synched below.What a load of long winded twaddle ! :r The fact remains all of the MPC devices are buggy as hell and can’t beat having a good HTPC… 
HTPC falls under MPC (Media Player Centers) so do your homework before replying nonsense friend. Media players fall under DMA (Digital Media Adapters) and not MPC’s. Further, a HTPC is not for the average PC user (more for the geeks that keep tweaking and updating all the time) and can’t tip at the convenience / Quality of a media player / NAS combination, not to mention the infrastructure not always is ideal or the consumption / noise of running a PC all the time. There’s a lot of pros and cons from both sides… Some like to fly with Boeing, others prefer helicopters… Both can fly but are pretty different, same with HTPC and DMA comparissons. They are two total different things. Anyway, any discussion with you is too much for me. It took only few words of yours to see how short sided you are and incapable of making a point rather than do some cheap response like this, making any discussion with you uninteresting for me. PS: Don’t blame CDFreaks for this reaction. I am not attached to this site… Enjoy
There is so much to read on the web that most times I tend to lose patience. I would love to see diagrams of generic objects showing connectivity options, actual photos of players, flow charts showing decision making, maybe even wizards for customized decision making, URLs for further reference and so on. Earlier when there were fewer articles being read by more people, this sort of hard work could be justified but now when there are more articles being read by fewer people, I can understand the reasons for a text only format.
I have to agree with that. Another propblem is that most of the products sold today are a work in progress. We no longer get finished products as it used to be but serve as beta testers paying the full price while the brands created a habit of delivering upon everything later on with firmware upgrades. How long would such articles be valid…? The article made now targeted 3 key points: - Players are not that different as many would expect - Players don’t live up to their hype and usage of “labels” - Players are not completed products and work in progress As far as people can make the link with HTPC (meaning some don;t understand the purpose of the article) and make claims how unstable these are (even when the article already stated that), i would mainly ask to remove the illegal content making the HTPC work (off the shelf comparison) and off course ask since when they have a stable windows that not needs patching every week either with anti virus soft, Spyware, Spam or Windows patches… (unless using linux but that is a very limited amount of people) Another problem, I wouldn’t even know where to start making such solutions available. I can write about opinions and what i see but i’m not as good a reporter to make such articles which indeed would be better. Remains time available as well… Sites often are communities so spending days on articles for sitres with no income is impossible. I would expect such articles from sites like ZDNet and PCMagazine… (but they spend even less time on tests than us community freaks…) Enjoy
Yeah … overall its a very good article/guide or whatever you wanna call it. The point is that anyone that wants to buy a MPC should be informed but ultimately should decide for him or herself. The article provides good, clean and simple information and thats what is important. I have a TVIX and i am very happy with my choice. Its a bit expensive but it does everything i want. Thanx for the article. 
Great article! I particularly liked the info on the chips. I had no idea. Very useful. What I would like to have seen more of would have been splitting the players by usage: the ones where you stick a usb flasf drive and press play, the ones that have an HDD networked etc. Note that you didn’t have the info, it was just spread too much. Also, i would have liked if you had included peculiarities of the players (not being able to handle types of xvid, etc.)
In fact, that was another part of the story. They all pretty much handle the same things and updates cause further updates catching up with each other or break things that used to work. The only differences really are in hardware. The players with USB slave have benefits (when shopping for one you can check if they have one) as you can connect these to PC and trasnfer data. This is important as transferring data over the network is killingly slow due to the limitd I/O abilities of the chips. Players with HDMI 1.3 will be able to handle HD Audio (TViX already does in the M-6500A now in a recent update) but there are other players with HDMI 1.3 that will play catch up now. This with HDMI 1.3 will never be able to support these… Anyway… Everyone is welcome to post questions. We prefer giving up to data information at the right time instead of maybe leaving an outdated schematics online we might not be able to keep up to date…
Correction, type error… HDMI 1.1 will never be able to handle HD Audio.
This message was edited at: 11-09-2008 02:59
Did the first commenter say everything is buggy except htPC!!!