September 30th, 2009 Posted in gadgets, movies | 4 Comments »
Some of you you may have already read my first experiences with a media center – the MVix Ultio in one of the following posts:
- Part 1: My initial excitement and thoughts for choosing the MVix Ultio
- Part 2: Me trying it out, somewhat disappointed, but still optmistic about making it work
- Part 3: Me deciding against giving it more chances and getting an Xtreamer instead
The main conclusions should you not want to read three posts above was that buying from ThinkGeek.com was online shopping bliss, the MVix Ultio wasn’t good enough/mature enough, didn’t have the advertised features and were missing features I thought were necessary. On top, the company had used nefarious business tactics by posting fradulant comments on blogs to make googlers mitakenely think the product was the bee’s knees. Fair should be fair though, the MVix Ultio wasn’t a bad product (though advertised features I needed such as being wifi capable were missing and didn’t work at the time), and all things considered I believed there were much better alternatives out there, with the Xtreamer being one of them, so I took the plunge. I chose the Xtreamer because it had DTS downmix, small size (as it uses a 2.5″ SATA drive) and had room for a built-in hard drive.
Common complaints I have encountered when reading about the Xtreamer:
1. Fan noise to loud
I don’t think this is warranted. Sure you can hear the fan if you listen for it, but it won’t disturb your viewing experience. I never notice it when a movie is running. I did some very unscientific testing with my iPhone. I bought a “decibel meter” app from the appstore and, well, you be the judge of whether the fan noise is disturbing (the graph below is half Xtreamer turned on, half turned off)…
While I don’t find it annoying, I do find it perculiar that the fan doesn’t have an “automatic” setting, but you have to set the speed at “low, medium, high”, with no guidance beyond that.
2. Not able to play high-def movies (e.g. BluRay rips)
I have encountered this once and I am not able to reproduce the “error”. For me all movies have played beautifully, but then again I haven’t tried that many very-high-def movies (think +30GB per file).
3. Internet services resolution too low (e.g. streaming movie trailers)
I can DEFINITELY confirm this, but before I go into what sucks, please note that the feature in itself works beautifully and reliably. You can stream youtube, news, stock tickers, music and, most importantly, movie trailers on the Xtreamer. I found the “movie trailers” function to be of great value actually because it just works and buffers the trailer quickly, but having a 37″ FullHD TV means that trailers look VERY grainy, because the Xtreamer doesn’t download a high-def versions of the videos – this is a big mistake on their part I think. Considering who might buy the Xtreamer, it’s aimed at people who watch high-def video (it’s even one of the selling points of the Xtreamer that it plays video upto 1080p resolution), and then all the internet video services are played in the the lowest possible resoution? it doesn’t add up. Hopefully they will fix it in one of their future firmware releases.
My experience of the Xtreamer
Overall the Xtreamer is well worth the money (it costs just €119 including shipping, without a hard drive which will set you back another €40-60 depending on the capacity you want), which I consider a steal. It’s the cheapest of it’s kind of player (when comparing to the likes of e.g. TViX, PopcornHour, MVix (both of them) or AC Ryan) and they all have just about the same features and same GUI (and are based on the almost exact same platforms). Great alternatives such as an AppleTV, XBox360 or Playstation 3 or full blown HTPCs are just so much more expensive than the Xtreamer, so you can’t compare them really – meaning if you’re considering an AppleTV or PS3, go for it, the Xtreamer and the likes won’t be comparable. The Xtreamer fills the need to easily watch video files that you download online in a small package, and that’s the purpose of it as I see it.
Now a lot of the other players I would compare the Xtreamer to (e.g. the MVix Ultio which i sold to buy the Xtreamer) have builtin bittorrent clients, but the implementation (all of them share the same implementation) are so(!!!) lousy it is of no use. Some of the other players don’t have .N wireless capability (again the MVix Ultio doesn’t have working wireless at all at the time of writing this), which just doesn’t work for me (so please note: if wireless doesn’t matter to you, you may weigh some of the other options higher than I have – the same goes for DTS downmix). Luckily the wireless implementation on the Xtreamer works really well as does DTS downmix.
Summing up the Xtreamer is hard. One thing the Xtreamer passed which I was most doubtful about was the girlfriend test – i.e. can Julie operate it even when I am not at home to answer questions? A big fat yes was the answer. She could watch movies, turn on/off subtitles, use the internet services to watcher trailers, copy movies from her computer to the Xtreamer etc., so that’s good. Other than that, I would mention the following in bullet form format to keep this post short(..er than otherwise):
- first of, who the f… designs the GUI of these devices (this goes for all current generation Realtek and Sigma based players) – it’s awful – like TRULY awful, as in it must have been designed by an engineer with absolutely ZERO flair for design. I mean, c’mon people, “Apple TV – Take 2″ came out years ago..steal borrow a little here!!!
- It plays every file I’ve thrown at it
- The size of the box is “just right”.
- The fan noise people are complaining about online, you would have to be really anal about sound for it to disturb your viewing experience in my humble opinion (and I mean anal to the degree that ordinary breathing would disturb you)
- DTS downmix also works on all files I have thrown at it
- UPnP implementation works as it should, streaming wirelessly from both my computer and my NAS without a hitch
- The built-in FTP server works (but WHY is there a limit that the ftp server port has to be setup below port 6000?)
- Similarly, why does the UPnP port have to be below port 9999? *sigh*
- DDnS service works flawlessly (but see above on port usage)
- Integration with TVersity media server integration works like a charm
- Network shortcuts are not only possible, they make your viewing easier if you have a NAS unit on your network (and it even remembers your password)
- F….ing $119, shipped to my door. ’nuff said!
Overall, keeping in mind what need the products tries to fulfill, I would give it a 7/10 rating (6/10 for features and 1 additional point for pricing it so low) in its current form. Sure the Xtreamer guys have announced upcoming firmware additions they intend to implement (see them here), which will make me love my Xtreamer even more and might increase the rating, but I’m reviewing it in its current form. It’s not the end-all of media players, but certainly it is good, if not great, value for money as a discrete media player. If you need a product that plays all video files you can find online, all backups of your DVDs, then the Xtreamer is for you. Throw in the internet services and it’s clear why I whole-heartedly recommend the product. Keep in mind, though, it is NOT a HTPC replacement.
Fourtwenty2009 – a douche
No company is perfect, neither is Xtreamer. They have made a good, if not great, product, but it seems karma needs to dump a little on me anyways making me like the product a little less, and the turd that hit me’s forum name was Fourtwenty2009.
//rant-on
Apparently whomever owns Xtreamer has allowed someone’s 16 year old douché bag of a kid to become an admin on the Xtreamer forum. Why 16 you say? Well just check the name, fourtwenty => 420 => urbandictionary says it best. A douche bag? Yes, well because I posted a post on the Xtreamer eTrayZ forum asking whether the upcoming Xtreamer eTRAYz NAS device would be using 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives. Fourtwenty2009 had apparently been smoking up that day and felt the need feel important (I’m guessing because of general lack of self worth) and deleted my post and wrote me a personal message telling me I should search before I posted on the forum and that I would be banned if I posted again about the issue – crappy service right?
Whomever owns Xtreamer probably aren’t aware that people they enlist as Administrator’s on the forum are their ambassadors, and douché bags such as as the (likely – based on observed behavior) 16 year-old yet pre-puberty, power-hungry, overweight, acne-attacked, pot-smoking, coke-drinking, sun-light deprived person that goes under the Xtreamer forum name “Fourtwenty2009″ actually hurt their image as a professional company that cares about their customers’ experience with them.
So anyway, I was surprised of the response from an administrator who seemed to know the answer but would not provide it, but I could still thought that many the harsh tone was due to a “give a man a fish and he won’t go hungry for a day, teach a man to fish and he will never go hungry” mentality, so I searched the forum for all the terms I thought likely terms to provide the answer but came up empty. I wrote fourtwenty2009 again that there was no answer in the forum and whether he could provide me the answer or I should just post again. His answer? I’ll let his words speak for themselves:
“You can read the FAQ. Or you could try disobeying the warning I just issued and be banned instead.”
Well, the FAQ is here, and I invite you to go there yourself and tell me the answer (I’m won’t kid myself with my blog being of big enough influence for the Xtreamer team to include this information in their FAQ). Anyway, based on the claim that drives as big as 2TB can be used, I’m fairly certain it’s a 3.5″, but since I can’t write to ask in the forum without getting banned and no one will tell me, I’m left guessing…
//rant-off
The reason for the story you ask? Well one conclusion could be that if you build a product of great enough value, customer service and customer experience post-sale doesn’t matter and any company can just hire or allow kids with a lust for power to manage customer forums. I’m fairly certain fourtwenty2009 feels this way.
Naturally, that’s not the point. There’s an old saying in marketing (the area of my work), that goes like this “1 satisfied customer tells one person about about the product, 1 dissatisfied customer will tell 10 about the poor experience”. Well, guess what, with blogs, you can tell thousands of people, so it becomes more important.
edit: Turns out that someone has been granted to ask my question now…thanks Xtreamer team minus FourTwenty2009
The future of my (Xteamer-powered) media setup
Enough ranting – The Xtreamer is a great product and their next in line will change my current media setup at home. My current media setup currently looks like the following:
As I briefly mentioned above, the guys are making (to be released in November) a NAS device called Xtreamer eTRAYz which looks very promising and costs a mere €59 (introductory pricing) and will require host hard drives and be able to run in a RAID configuration for added security and lots of other features (see here for details).
I’m going to buy this device (despite the poor customer service as exhibited by Fourtwenty2009 – I’ll hope that his admin rights are revoked due to him being too incompetent handle the “job” as an admin), which will streamline my media setup, and probably most importantly, move the internal 2.5″ hard drive from the Xtreamer to my laptop, shut off the fan, hide the Xtreamer eTRAYz in a closet with a direct connection to the router and since the eTRAYz also support direct bittorrent and (is road mapped to support) usenet-NBZ-file downloading (which, from the description given by the Xtreamer guys, works like it is supposed to). This I will describe in more detail in a later post. In the mean time, see the chart of my expected setup below. while It’s closely related my current setup, the notable addition of the Xtreamer eTRAYz makes me move the hard drive out of the Xtreamer, disable the fan and put all my music and videos on the eTRAYz and put it in a closet. Noise free and with centralized media storage (in a a RAID configuration for added data integrity)…nerdgasm bliss
PART 2 (coming soon): Buying the Xtreamer eTrayZ and chanigng my media setup (see link below if I have posted it)
They were cool about it and handled it very professionally, but kind of a crappy start. When I landed in Narita airport in Tokyo, was so stupid as to inform the customs officer that I had some insulin pen prototupe devices with me, and they almost didn’t let me through, but because I had piece of paper stating “it’s ok, he can bring this into your country”, signed our department assistant, it went ok. My travel companion had not prepared such document, which meant we got to spend another 1½ hours in customs (where whenever I tried to sit down, I was politely asked to keep upright), until ultimately they had to destroy the 500 insulin pen needles he tried to bring into the country – which they had to count in front of him (despite him telling them that “IT’S OK, JUST THROW IT ALL AWAY”)……TWICE. Oh and to top it all off, it had apparently escaped me that in Japan they use a different cellphone system (unless your phone uses 3G…which my blackberry bold does not), so my phone didn’t work…ffs…
Oh yeah, after the meeting, which despite having our samples confiscated went very well, we were invited out to eat by the affiliate because I had ensured that a product I had been commercially responsible for developing and introducing, won the prestigious G-Mark (Good Design) award.
). Så se nu bare at komme ned til stemmeurner!! 
The article here is in danish. Consider using 
