Tuesday, February 7, 2012

XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5 Hard Drive Bays)


Price : Too low to display
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The Xtreamer PRO player is based on the same successful platform of the smaller Xtreamer model. It allows you to stream HD (MKV H.264) movies or user-generated videos, listen to high-quality digital music and show high-resolution photo slide-shows on your TV. With the added dual 3.5" SATA drive bays, you can now have a gigantic capacity of up to 4 TB storage. The Xtreamer Pro is equipped with double the memory of the smaller model and adds an ultra-fast eSATA connector (with dedicated controller chip on-board). Experience the new spectacular artistic GUI on your TV screen and amazing picture quality of HD video and crystal clear 7.1 CH digital audio.* Chipset: Realtek 1283X JM20336 - Dedicated Storage Controller Memory: 512mb Total: 256MB DDR 2 SDRAM & 256MB Flash Audio/Video outputs: HDMI v1.3a (up to 1080p) Composite Video Stereo Analog Audio S/PDIF Optical Digital Audio Interface: 1x USB 2.0 slave 2x USB 2.0 host Internal SATA 2 eSATA Front Network: Ethernet 10/100 RJ-45 OPTIONAL USB WIFI 802.n Antenna (SOLD SEPERATELY) Media Support: BluRay ISO with Simple Navigation Commercial DVD with menus. Artistic GUI: Multilingual On Screen Display , Subtitles & GUI: Arabic, Thai, Hebrew,Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, Italian, Turkish, Greek , Dutch, French, Latvian, Russian, Croatian, Portugese, Swedish, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, English, Magyar, Czech, Slovenian, Finish, Danish, UTF-8

This review is from : XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5" Hard Drive Bays)
Great Player for Certain People . This is my third media payer over the last five years or so. The first was an Mvix/Unicorn product, the second was a WD HDTV, and the third is this box. All three are good in their own ways, but this one beats the other two hands down.

This player may not be for everyone out there, because the menus and some features are a little "rough" as other have said, or at least are not exactly intuitive. Put another was, this is the exact opposite of an Apple product. Note: that's not necessarily a bad thing!

This is what this product does well:

- It allows you organize massive amounts of media storage into one simple menu for playback on your TV - just set any folder from any internal drive, external usb, etc. to the "Favorites" list.
- It plays back just about any file type I can throw at it (My WDHDTV had problems with some MKV formats)
- Frequent updates address many of the issues that other users have reported. Also note that the updates can de done directly from the menu (as long as you have the wifi antenna) so no need to search for a download, plug in the laptop, etc.
- Internet radio, you tube, internet TV channels, etc.
- File transfer feature is pretty cool - this allows you to transfer files from one place to another without the need to plug the device into a computer. For example, plug in a flash drive or usb hard drive, then transfer over what you want to the internal drive without having to use a computer.
- MASSIVE STORAGE (two internal 3.5 bays, esata, two usb ports, plus the possibility of streaming over the network)!

In sum, if you want ultimate ease of use (and you like paying $10-$20 for compressed video files) get yourself an AppleTV, but if you want ultimate functionality and you can deal with figuring out a few settings and menus, and especially if you want to terabyte upon terabyte of storage for your HD MKV files or whatever format you happen to have your movie collection in (ISO, avi, MP4...etc.), this player may be for you!
XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5" Hard Drive Bays) Reviews
Good Hardware but needs work . So, I've had a few days to test out the Pro. I have experience with the ROKU SDRoku SD Player box and loved it. I thought I would solve a network storage for media problem as well as eliminating a DVD carousel and CD carousel.
The good: This box is tiny. The box looks nice. The remote is easy to use and has special function keys to speed things up. With fan on low, I only hear hard-drive noise. The UI is usually fast (although it slows down when switching thumbnails) and the boot time is fast. DVD ISOs seem to play without issue. DVD ISOs stream across wireless N without a problem. The device found all of my NAS shares devices automatically. The video quality seems to be good but it is hard to tell as I have had to drop back to composite video as I do not have HDMI.

The difficult:
Firmware:
The firmware provided needs a good bit of work. The functions implemented are brittle. Something works for this file this way and for the next file of the same type it will not. You either get a black screen that you can get out of or the device reboots altogether. Currently, the device reboots all of the time for me as I try something, it hangs and then restarts. The device UI is designed for large screen displays. On my 32", the text is very hard to read. Will not copy files to the box without a flash drive inserted even though it has HD installed.

Music:
The device fails to play any file from my Thecus NAS N2100 Network Attached Media Server (Black). However, it will stream across the network from a PC and will play locally.

Jukebox:
Performance is slow.

Video:
When playing videos through the optical digital cable, it appears that the device is outputting analog signals as opposed to digital. I suspect this because the PCM indication is raised with my receiver rather than just Dolby.

Internet TV
The implementation of the internet tv screens is badly laid out. The thumbnails either do not load or are mismatched in size.

Summary:
The UI is several steps down from the ROKU standard I love.
The reliability of just doing what is supposed to be supported is not there.
XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5" Hard Drive Bays) Opinions
EXCELLENT PRODUCT . I bough this product after reading reviews of several media players. It's wonderful. And if you want to use it in a full way, you need a LAN connection. The device reads ISO files and every audio codec you need (DTS HD-MA, DOLBY DIGITAL HD). It's even possible to see a copy of a BR with identical sound and image quality as you watch it with a BR player like this model OPPO BDP-83 Blu-ray Disc Player with SACD, DVD-Audio, and VRS Technology
Robust and easy to use with great options for expandability . The Xtreamer media player is a great device for those who require a very large storage space. It contains 2 x 3.5" SATA bays so technically speaking, you could go up to 6TB of data - more than enough for most. On top fo that, it also has several USB slots with USB host support. This means you can plug in an external USB drive and play the content from there. This is a great feature when you want to quickly play a media file stored on a portable drive. I may also point out that installing an internal drive is optional and you can run the unit purely from using the USB ports.

The case itself is mostly made out of brushed black aluminium with the exception of the front plastic face which is nice to see that they make electronics that are solid instead of plastic everything.

I have used this for approx 8 months now and it has never come across a file it could not play. I have tried all SD to HD (1080p) content and it played it flawlessly without any lag. Firmware updates has been excellent from the Xtreamer team to fix major issues and bugs as initially, the player did freeze up a few times when the product was first released. However, after a few weeks, firmware updates fixed this problem and they have continued to relase more updates to improve the stability as well features.

One downside is that the wireless N option is an extra cost. $27 in this case which is not really large amounts of dollars. Wirelss N speeds means it can transfer 1080p HD content without a problem or any lag. The Xtreamer unit is easy to use and something you can give to a person that is "technologically challenged" to use.
The best! . Plays files a WD Live wouldn't, handles two 2 Tb USB drives (a WD Live crashed with), and sees the PCs on the network. It plays back DD TruedHD and DTS-HD Master too.

It is great. Music is great, pictures are great, video is great. Streaming stuff is mostly SD, if you want that, I only play the HD stuff. Call me picky!

This is great box; so much better than a WD product. All I can say is BUY ONE!
understand this and you will be ok . This is one of many solutions that I have setup for myself and some friends.

Recently did a network for my friend and chose this product even after reading many reviews stating that people are not happy with their units.

First there are a few things that you need to take into consideration when setting up a home media sharing device.

1. The video you play will affect the experience. Here's what I mean My friend came to me and said he wanted 1 device that could store, play and stream his videos throughout his home. He wanted to connect using his wireless network. The issue here is that he wants his movies in HD. Well I'm sorry to disappoint but you start trying to send 4gb HD MP4's or MKV's over your wireless network and you are going to be disappointed with the results as you are going to get freezing, pixelization etc..

2. If you are downloading videos off the internet its hard to control the quality of what you are getting so don't blame the player for poorly ripped movies

I set him up with DVDfab. Its expensive like $100 but well worth it With it he can rip dvd's to MKV file format in about 4 hours I recommend using 2 pass encoding and keeping the bitrate no higher than 1500. For audio I choose 5.1 multichannel and the highest bitrate, Lastly I usually set the volume to 175% as it seems to play back batter.

Secondly Once you have your files, How you transfer them is important. I wired him up with a D-link gigabit router ($180) and a 16 port switch ($160) I ran cat 5e cable to each room it wasn't too bad since he has a ranch syle home with a basement.

I understand that most people won't have the technical ability to run their own cat5 cable. so if you must use wireless you need to keep your files to UNDER 1.4gb.

Now my recommendation?

forget this. get yourself a new or used computer load a copy of windows 7 or windows home server on it. Pop in a Promise tx4 sata card ($60) and 4 samsung f4 2tb drives ($80 each) and run all your video files off that.

Then use your xbox or pS3 to play back your files or use a WD TV live+.

FINAL WORDS

This is a good product USERS make this a poor product by trying to make it work WITHOUT the proper infrastructure. If you don't have the right stuff to go with ANY media player its not going to do what the manufacturer says it will do.



As an example here is how I spent my friends $1800.00 when I set this up for him.


XTREAMER PRO Media Player $300.00
D-Link Xtreme Router DGL-4500 $180.00
D-Link 16-Port Switch $160.00
D-Link DAP-2553 AirPremier PoE $160
2 samsung F4 harddrives $160.00
2 WD TV Live Plus Media Players $200
1 roll cat5e cable $120.00
wall plates & connectors $200
DVDFab DVD Copy + DVD Ripper $125 (lifetime updates)
assorted HDMI cables $100


Of course being my friend I did not charge him labor costs. Labor if it had been a regular customer would have added about $2000 for the whole package delivered, installed and setup $4000. That includes running 2 cat5 lines to every room in the house and 6 lines down to his media cabinet in the basement.


Yeah its alot of money but this setup will serve him for at minimum the next 10 years.
Xtreamer Pro . This player is the best i tried the patriot box office (return it they always come out with new boot codes wich only them can upgrade slow firmware updates & very buggy) cinematube 3-1 (send back for the newer model) then the cinemago (return it firmware bug) had a weird bug that make me lost all my files of my seagate freeagent go 500GB (after playing media on it the player crash so i din't turn it on again & bang my hardrive was shown in my computer as corrupted same on the seagate software it fix the hardrive but all my files gone they got corrupted with couple of partions of the hardive) lucky i had a backup hardrive otherwise it would it have been a total nightmare/catastrophe!!!

This player is just ******** amazing!!!

Nice UI menus
Playback
Support
Firmware updates when you leased expect them but fixing and adding new stuff they do listing to the community!!
Options
Online Stuff (TV,movies,Youtube,RSS,Weather etc....more)

Man i can't describe it all but you can go to the site & check for yourself: [...]

Also download the manual if you want to check everything with pictures: [...]

And check it out all the new stuff that comes in the recent RC Firmware 2.4.20: [...]

If you're looking for something looking awesome having support very often look no more this is not like the other company's that they drop support on their recent/past units just cause a new model came out don't believe me check the site out you won't regret it!!!

It is worth your money it may cost a little more than the other ones you see online but get the one that is gonna give you what you want.
I like this thing . I just purchased this Xtreamer Pro unit, and received it a few days ago. So far, I am very happy with the unit. I originally purchased an Eminent EM7080 from another on line retailer, but for some unknown reason, they never delivered the unit. The retailer said that the unit was to ship directly from the manufacturer, and they ended up sending an email to the retailer saying that the unit would not be shipping. I can only imagine that there must be either something wrong with the design, or they just don't have any production units to send me. I have since checked with the retailer, and they have removed the unit from their web site, so I am thinking that there may be a problem with the units design. I paid $348 for the EM7080 unit, and am I happy that they didn't send it! This Xtreamer unit is only $200, and it has up to 4 times the hard drive capacity. 4 TBs !!! It looks like it can decode many formats. I was a little bummed out at first, because I own an Archos media player, that also records (in AVI format), and I already had many digital recordings that I wanted to be able to watch from the Xtreamer. Unfortunately, the Xtreamer can't decode the audio stream that the Archos unit encodes with (it says UNKNOWN AUDIO FORMAT). The video plays back, but with no audio. It would be very nice if the folks at Xtreamer can get that to work. This doesn't mean that the Xtreamer can't play back AVI video (with audio). Apparently, there are different audio formats that work with the AVI format. I also have a Hado HD video recorder (1280 x 720p) that encodes in the AVI format, and these play back very nicely on the Xtreamer. It also plays back my Flip recorder videos with no problems. I am getting tired of seeing 640 x 480 video on my HD 63" Samsung Plasma anyway. Maybe its time to get a decent HD Video Camera! But this thing really makes it easy to watch your video files. It functions as a NAS (network attached storage) device, and this is how I am getting my files onto the Xtreamer hard drive. In fact, when I copy files from my Hado, I copy them directly to the Xtreamer. DONE. You can create folders that relate to the content on the Xtreamers hard drive, so this helps to organize all of your stuff. I have also been enjoying the internet streaming, something that I didn't think that I would be too interested in. But, I do like watching NBC's world news with Brian Williams, and if you get home too late to see it... No Worries! You can stream it in later... and the best part of that is NO COMMERCIALS!!! It doesn't come in HD, sadly, but still full screen, and its not bad. The internet streaming feature is actually pretty cool. When I first installed the hard drive ( i used a WD 1.5 TB green) the instructions say you must format the drive in the device, which I did. It said that it was using the NTFS format, and I was wondering how long that might take. It only took a brief moment. I thought that this couldn't possibly be right, but it seems to be working with no problems, and it is reporting the full size of the drive. I am not sure how that could only take a moment, but happy that I didn't have to wait around for it.

I am thinking that you can't go wrong with this unit, and I am now thinking about getting another one for the living room TV setup. I hope this helps! L8ter!

Cons Review
THIS THING LOVES TO REBOOT SPONTANEOUSLY - IM SENDING IT BACK!!!! . I thought this product was great, I read good reviews about it, but mine just spontaneously reboots!!!!. Upgraded to the new firmware, but didn't fix it! It just reboots anytime it wants too, and somitimes gives me a green screen, and hangs! It reboots while i'm browsing the files of when using File Mananager. Sometimes reboots when I'm in JukeBox just browing movies....

What is worst, it even reboots in the middle of a movie!!!

It is very annoying!!!! I'm going to return it and give it another try, and get another one... I'm hoping that this is just a bad device that I received. I will let you know next time I got the other one.

---------------

5/29/2011 - Yes, I bit the bullet again, just to give it another chance... I got the second xtreamer pro more than a week ago now... THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE. DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS PRODUCT. POOR QUALITY. THIS PRODUCT IS HORRIBLE. Nothing but problems... after a week, jukebox started acting flaky, it can't scrape my new ISO, and the third day, it wiped out the entire contents of my movie folder including all the fanarts, xmls and ISO files,, I spent/wasted 2 weeks time ripping my DVDS, only to be deleted by this poor product... I WILL NEVER USE ANY OF XTREAMER products again, I just lost my confidence to this company. What is worst, they dont have a real customer support, I emailed them again, and all I got is the same answer, "Reinstall your firmware.. blablabla". You have to rely to the community of users if you really need help. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME and MONEY.

I've never return a product to amazon before, I can't believe I will ask again for a refund, second time around, for the same product, I dont think this is a coincidence, This product is horrible, Period!. I'm really DISAPPOINTED. I'm very thankful that I bought this through amazon, and they honor returns/refund, especially for very poor product like this one. It's time to buy a competing product now.

Too bad, I can't change and downgrade the Star from 2 to 1 for my second review. It doesn't even deserve a 1 star.
Stream over Network so bad . The stream over network is terrible, a crap, the files over 2GB get stuttering, if you want to use the xtreamer pro like a media center over your network FORGET IT but if you gonna use it locally (no network) is perfect for you, I don't recommended this device, too expensive if you gonna use all features that should work smoothly.

Product Image


Feature XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5 Hard Drive Bays)

  • Two 3.5" Hard Drive Bay with up to 4TB Hard Disk Capacity
  • Integrated dedicated eSATA controller & PC eSATA bracket included
  • Twice the Memory of the original Xtreamer
  • Stunning HD Graphical User Interface
  • Full 7.1 HD Audio SupportDTS-HS MA & Dolby True-HD NOT YET AVAILABLE (requires a pending firmware update!)




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Product Details

EAN : 8809154177376
MPN : pro2bayms
Brand : Xtreamer
Weight : 5 pounds
Height : 5 inches
Length : 12 inches
Width : 11 inches
Binding : Electronics
ItemPartNumber : XTREAMERPRO
Manufacturer : Xtreamer
Model : pro2bayms
Publisher : Xtreamer
SKU : m10929093
Studio : Xtreamer

Where To Buy


You can buy XTREAMER PRO Media Player & Network Streamer (2 x 3.5 Hard Drive Bays) on Amazon . Click here to Read More