In an effort to be more Web-focused, the Live Hub also offers some Web-based widgets, including ones for Flickr, Facebook and CNN. Compared to Google TV’s complete embracing of the Web, though, WD’s effort seems a little weak.

Are Media Streamers numbered?

Media streamers like the Live Hub fill an odd space in the home entertainment market, and personally I think their days are numbered. The point of a media streamer is to play your content (videos, tunes and photos) from your PC onto the devices that are capable of playing it back much more impressively (your HDTV or Hi-Fi).

Technically, most of them do this very well, streaming content in many different formats, and connecting to many different devices. The problem has always been the user interface.

The Media Streamer’s Achilles Heel

The user interface is the part of the media streamer that you use – it’s the screen on the telly and the remote control you use to access your media and to play it. Unfortunately, this has always been crudely implemented, with the result being that media streamers have only ever been niche devices, loved by geeks, but not the mainstream.

Now with the likes of Google TV and Apple TV, there are new shiny interfaces onto all your media from two companies who really know what they’re doing with software. Both Google TV and Apple TV offer fantastic interfaces, with Google TV in particular offering a seamless Web and TV interface that makes browsing your media a snip no matter where it’s stored.

So the WD TV Live Hub really has its work cut out if it’s going to compete with Google TV and Apple TV. At $199.99, it’s $100 cheaper than Google TV, but $100 more than Apple TV. Personally, I think it’s a good device, but it’s much too little, and it’s already overshadowed by its bigger rivals.

If a company wants to make a successful media streamer now, they’d better make sure its interface is at least as good as Apple and Google’s offerings. Currently, only Boxee seems to be doing that, but the other manufacturers need to step up if they want to stay in the game.

[Source: Pocket-Lint]

Luckily, QNAP has launched the new QNAP NMP-1000P Network Media Player, which can support pretty much every kind of video and audio format you’ll ever come across, and decode it using a super-quick 667MHz audio/video decoder from Sigma Solutions.

That’s not the half of it, though. in order to do such trickery, the NMP-1000P needs to get its media from somewhere, and thanks to the magic of Ethernet and Wi-Fi, it can suck it up either from your PC or the Internet.

So what does the QNAP NMP-1000P Network Media Player actually do?

In layman’s terms, this means the NMP-1000P will playback any video and any tune you can throw it, and either send it to your HDTV, your home theatre system, or your hi-fi (depending on whether it’s a video or audio file, obviously!)

Any of your videos or tunes can either be streamed through the NMP-1000P from your PC, or simply stored on its internal hard drive for later use, in which case you won’t need to switch your PC on to play the file.

But what if you don’t have much media on your PC? No problem, the NMP-1000P will also stream content directly from the following Web apps:

• Mediafly
• Apple Movie Trailers
• CNN
• SHOUTcast
• Internet radio service
• Flickr
• Picasa

It’s even got a built-in FTP client and BitTorrent client, so you can download media from other computers connected to the Internet, and all without turning your own PC on.

What can you connect it to?

Round the back, it’s like a swiss-cheese of connection sockets! The NMP-1000P comes with the following ports:

• USB
• eSATA (for external hard drives)
• HDMI v1.3a (for connecting to your HDTV and streaming 1080p movies)
• Audio out
• Component Video
• Composite Video
• Analog stereo out (for connecting to your hi-fi)
• SP/DIF (for digital connection to your hi-fi via optical cable)

Add to that the built-in Wi-Fi receiver, plus the Ethernet port, and you can see that the NMP-1000P really will connect to anything – and is just about the geekiest gadget you’re ever likely to buy for your home media setup.

It gets better, though. If you think that’s geeky, just wait until you see what video formats it supports!

What media types can it play?

Video files are complicated beasts, and if you have a video that’s encoded in a format that your hardware doesn’t support, you won’t be able to watch it. Worse, the video itself will be encoded using a certain format (such as MPEG), and will then be contained in a container (such as AVI), which contains other files such as titles, playlists, subtitles, and other meta-data. Again, if your media player doesn’t support the container, it won’t be able to play the video.

With the NMP-1000P, though, it’s not a problem. Here’s the list of video formats it supports:

• MPEG1
• MPEG2
• MPEG4
• XVID
• H.264
• H.263
• WMV9
• VC1

And here’s the list of containers:

• AVI
• MPEG/MPG
• VCD (ISO, MPG, NRG)
• DVD (VOB, IFO, ISO, NRG)
• WMV
• ASF
• TP
• TS
• TRP
• M1V
• M2V
• M4V
• M2P
• M2T
• M2TS
• BDMV/BD ISO
• MTS
• MOV
• MP4
• RMP4
• MKV
• MOD
• 3GP

Phew! That’s pretty much every video format and container you can think of! And that doesn’t even include the list of audio and picture formats supported!

Like I say, the QNAP NMP-1000P really is a geeky but of kit, but if you need a media player that will connect to anything, decode anything, and stream anything using wires or wireless, you really should give this little box serious consideration.

[Source: SlashGear]

Unfortunately, getting your laptop to stream YouTube clips onto your PC has been a nightmare. You can do it farily simply with a simple HDMI connection, but that involves placing your laptop near your telly and hooking it up with a wire – if you can find the wire in the first place!

Wireless streaming media is the ultimate goal, but this too is fraught with difficulty. There are loads of different devices on the market, but none of them are satisfactory. They’re either too expensive, too complicated, don’t actually work all that well, or insist you use their own rubbish onscreen programming guide.

Fortunately, Alereon might just have the solution with the Alereon NoWire Laptop to HDTV Externder Kit. Not exactly an attractive name, but it does exactyl what it says on the tin!!

More details after the jump.

The Alereon NoWire has been released today at CES 2010. As all the best ideas are, it’s extremely simple: you plug a USB stick into your laptop and an HDMI adaptor into your TV…and that’s it!

The USB stick will stream YouTube, Hulu, or any other video directly from your laptop to the HDMI adaptor in 720p HD, and all without any wires.

This means you can control your vids from laptop, which can be placed on your lap on the sofa, while you and your friends watch the vids on your giant HDTV. No mess, no fuss, no wires – perfect!

The Alereaon NowWire Extender will be available early in 2010.

[Source: SlashGear]

None of them have set the world alight, though. However, that still doesn’t stop people trying. Step forward Netgear, who have just launched the new Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite.

The Digital Entertainer Elite is a bland featureless box that hooks up to your HDTV and streams your music and videos wirelessly directly from your PC or its large 500GB internal hard drive.

Indeed, it’s the size of its drive that Netgear are promoting as the Digital Entertainer’s main advantage. By comparison, Apple TV offers only 160GB, and the XBox 360 120GB.

In addition to media from your PC or the internal hardrive, the Digital Entertainer Elite will also pull in content directly from the Internet via Flickr and YouTube, which is a nice touch, and great timing, too, as YouTube have just announced they’re now able to play videos in HD.

My only problem with the Digital Entertainer Elite is that it looks dull, and although it sounds like it should be a really cool product, it just sounds too utilitarian to excite me enough to want to buy it. Maybe that’s what everyone else thinks as well, as media streamers haven’t exactly captured the public’s imagination.

[Source: Wired]

You can stream your tunes from your PC, your mobile phone (naturally!), an MP3 player (via USB) or even directly from the Web. In short, anything with a USB connector or that supports UPnP can connect with the Nokia Home Music System.

As far as connectivity goes, Nokia’s little box supports both Ethernet and Wi-Fi for Internet and PC streaming. It also comes with an FM receiver, and will connect to dozens of Internet Radio stations.

It has a great looking display, which will display the contents of the connected device, and you can control your playlist directly from the Home Music’s LCD screen via a remote control, rather than from the connected device.

There’s even an SP/DIF optical connector (for digital connections) and RCA line-out (for analogue connections) to hook up to literally any Hi-Fi ever made, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and, as if all that wasn’t enough, a 10W built-in speaker, just in case you haven’t got your Hi-Fi switched on yet and you really need to hear that new tune from Timmy Mallet!!!

Frankly, I’m in disbelief. This has to be the media streamer that has everything – looks, all the connectivity you could ever need, and exactly the right level of features to make it a must have. I’ve been after a media streamer now for some time, and I think I’ve just found it! Shame it’s not going to be available in time for Christmas, but I’m sure I can persuade the Easter Bunny to give me a Nokia Home Music system next year, rather than the half a hundredweight of chocolate he normally leaves!

I’ve been excited by Nokia’s new N97 phone that was also announced today, but this is just the icing on the cake!

[Source: Nokia]

This is an exciting development, but also a somewhat disappointing one at the same time, as I’ll explain (and maybe rant a little!) after the jump.

Excitement!

OK, first the excitement. Ever since I set up MediaMentalism in 2006, it’s been obvious to me that we’re slowly working our way to a home in which we’re all able to share our media wirelessly from one device (such as a PC) to another (a TV). What I didn’t count on, though, was exactly how slowly such a vision would take to develop! It’s two years’ later, and still there’s no such thing as an iconic media streamer that the average person in the street can identify.

The Samsung MediaLive is therefore an exciting development in that it brings that vision one step closer, as it’s a well engineered product from a large blue-chip electronics manufacturer, rather than a no frills toy from some random Chinese bargain basement company that no-one’s ever heard of, or a one-product wonder from a company with big ideas but a development budget too small for mainstream market penetration.

No, Samsung are big and they’re highly respected. The Samsung MediaLive is therefore a big deal, and best of all, has been given a genuine brand name (MediaLive) rather than some arbitrary (and unpronouncable) arrangement of digits and numbers. If Samsung are prepared to push the MediaLive concept, we could all have media streamers in our hoems in just a couple of years.

Disappointment!

And so, naturally, to the disappointment. Samsung keep referring to the MediaLive as a device for seamlessly sharing content from a PC and a Samsung 2008 HDTV; in other words, it’s not a generic box for transferring media, it’s a proprietary Samsung box that will only work with Samsung HDTVs.

This is a crying shame and an opportunity missed, as the MediaLive looks really good and has the potential to be a huge seller in the average home, if only it connected PCs to any TV, not just Samsung’s 2008 HDTVs.

Still, Samsung are no different from other manufacturers; Sony have been doing the same for a couple of years with their media streamers. That’s the problem with getting devices to share, I guess. No-one told the manufacturers that their devices should also share with devices from other manufacturers, rather than just their own!

The strategy of locking people in to one manufacturers’ technology is as old as the hills, but we’re in a different age now. The Internet and the Web has brought with a whole new generation of products and users who are used to the open model of free sharing, and the services that result are far richer, and far more rewarding to the companies that provide them, than a closed model will ever be.

Even the mobile phone networks are realizing this now, tearing down their walled gardens and letting their users access the entire Web, rather than just the isolated parts of it that each network controlled.

A call to arms

It’s time the electronics giants woke up to this fact and recognized that their devices are no longer seen as one part of a monolithic entertainment system with every component made by the same manufacture; rather, we buy them as individual devices that we hope will integrate with other devices from other manufacturers, with the whole set of disparate devices forming a single home network, the nature of which is unique to every home.

Entertainment systems are a thing of the past: unlock your fixed ideas and open up your business models, before somebody else comes along and steals your market from under you!

Full details of the Samsung MediaLive adaptor

OK, rant over! The Samsung MediaLive is actually quite a great media streamer by all accounts, and can even be installed behind your (Samsung 2008!) HDTV, making it a set-behind box, rather than a set-top box!

Better still, because it’s a Windows Vista Media Center Extender, the user interface displayed on your HDTV is all Vista, and not some crummy series of menus thrown together at the last minute.

Looks rather good, you’d have to agree!

Full details follow:

Samsung Electronics America Inc., the leader in the U.S. digital television market, lets consumers view PC-content on a Samsung HDTV with the retail launch of the company