Prismiq MediaPlayer

[ajlenze]

The Prismiq MediaPlayer seems like the convergence device I've been looking for. http://www.prismiq.com/products/ It connects to your home entertainment system/home theater system and your home computer network (wired or wireless) and allows you to stream media files, both audio and video, to your entertainment system.

I see one of these devices in my future, along with a SageTV computer with 3 Haupauge PVR-250s. With this setup I can put my big and relatively noisy PC in the basement, happily recording TV for me, while I watch the recorded files on my home theater (HT) system.

Now wouldn't it be COOL if somehow the devices integrated together? I could both control the Sage TV system from my HT system and use Sage's time-shifting functions. This seems to me to be the ULTIMATE solution. (Maybe it would even create much more demand for both SageTV and Prismiq, hint, hint, hint...)

Drew

[-LD]

don't waste your money on the Prismiq...i had one for a week and returned it...it's extremely slow and unresponsive whenever you try to change the onscreen menu...it locked up a lot...it didn't support too many codecs though they keep promising it will...the GUI is horribly ugly to look at with no way to skin it

the machine doesn't have the balls to play back most media files that have a decent bitrate (i.e. mpeg2)...whenever i did that it hard locked and required a power cycle...forget wireless if you want to stream mpeg2 on this thing as well, the results were only worse

prismiq has gotten a lot of good press but i suspect it's not from people who play around with these kind of toys all the time...it's got great "ooh, ahh" factor for someone unfamiliar with current technology but falls very short when compared to what a person can build from exisiting hardware and existing software

don't even get me started on the crappy media manager utility they have

its only benefit is the relatively inexpensive price tag...but you get what you pay for and the hardware is cheap and too slow to handle much more than mp3s or low quality video

[ajlenze]

Thanks for the reply. It's good to hear from someone who actually used a Prismiq device. How long ago did you try the device?

Drew

[-LD]

i got mine in january i believe...i just checked their site and they say now that they support dixv which is good

it just can't play higher quality movie files from what i experienced...the hardware is really slow...and forget ever using the AIM feature...i tried a few times and it was always at least 100 keystrokes behind (no, i'm not exaggerating)

[Xleon]

It must be a poor implementation of the CPU used as the specs on the NEC website look quite impressive:-

Key to the performance capabilities of NEC's new SoC is its two integrated MIPS processor cores.

Key Features of the uPD61120 SoC
Dual MIPS32 4Kc CPUs
225 MIPS performance at 187 megahertz (MHz) frequency
3.3-volt (V) interface and 1.5V core operation
Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) for DDR SDRAM
Programmable transport stream de-multiplexer
Digital video broadcasting (DVB) and DirecTV® compliance
Serial or parallel stream interface
High-speed data output port for IEEE-1394 interface
Audio MPEG1/MPEG2 compliance
NTSC, PAL and SECAM compliance

[ChePazzo]

Not sure if anyone is still reading this thread, but I feel I must say something....

I have the Prismiq and love it. The hardware supports streams up to 9Mbps. I typically stream 2 or 6 Mbps MPEG-2 to it without any problems. It also can accept VOB (all MPEG1,2 is decoded in HW).

DIVX works for most encodings, but is transcoded to MPEG1 on the PC prior to streaming.

I now use Prismiq with my Haupauge250 and it is a wonderful experience.

I wonder if the problems most here have had is because they are trying to stream high bitrates over 802.11b. If so, you're just asking for trouble. 802.11b has way too much overhead to allow seamless video streaming. 802.11g is much better if you must go wireless (both are supported by prismiq), but use wired if you can.