thebrave's blog

I’ve bought the Xtreamer a week or two ago. The rationale for buying it was:

• it has a network interface (both Ethernet and optional wifi dongle)
• it supports an huge quantity of containers and codecs (see list here)
• it’s very cheap (in fact, just a few euros above the WD live)

So after a few days of uses, this is my first thoughts of it.

Firstly, on the codec side, it seems to be able to do what it’s supposed to do. I’m a big fan of fansubs of Japanese anime and the new productions are using 720p/h264, ac3 audio, and weird (.ssa) subtitles encapsulated in Matroska containers. Previously, in my PS2, setup, because that poor thing hasn’t enough firepower to decode h264, I used the Xvid version or had to recode to it.

Any file I put to it plays beautifully, the subtitle section of settings are fantastic. Even if it doesn’t support those color/position/effect/font tags, all subtitles are supported, and you can easily change the position, color and size of subtitles.

The device has either a HDMI 1.3b output (and has the license to downscale DSS audio to 2.1, take that WD Live) and a composite one. While I wish it would also have RGB/component outputs, the composite one is a nice backup when travelling. Initially, I had problems in my SDTV setup because the HD content was going pas the limit of the screen, and I really needed the hard-subs, but there is an option to scale the video.

The fan sure is noisy, but in the minimal speed, it gets almost silent. And some feedback in the forum seems to imply that for non 24/7 operation without an integrated drive, disabling the fan (you can do that from the configuration menu) won’t harm the device.

My major gripe is the shitty online section. Services are outdated, disappearing, and there is no plugin/api to let the community fill the gap, yet. And the remote is terrible.

At least, it does play nice with my NAS setup (that uses SAMBA), and the frequent upgrades let me hope for the best for the future.