MediaGate's Inexpensive, Wireless HDMI Media Player
We are all about taking trips down memory lane (as long as those memories don’t include lighting kittens on fire or dressing up as Spiderman at 25). We have been on the search for an all-inclusive media player that takes on all of our worthwhile requests without breaking our budget. After taking a look at the MediaGate MG-M2TVD Digital Media Player HDMI, we were pretty impressed by what this long-named device with multiple personalities could do.
Now we not only can view a slideshow of our family photos but listen to our desired music with the MediaGate MG-M2TVD Digital Media Player HDMI Full 1080P with DTS 2.0 Digital Audio Out. Whew. Say that ten times fast. The MediaGate player comes with DTS 2.0 Digital Surround Sound support, movie, video, music, MP3, and photo playback. It works as a SD/MMC/Memory Stick card reader and allows you to plug in additional USB drives to expand your storage. Unlike some others, none is included, nor is there a standard drive bay. But there is HDMI, as well as component, composite, and optical connections to suit just about every need (no S-video).
We’ve previously reviewed media players by Cirago and Roku and found that for the price, this offered a compelling feature set. For starters, wireless is supported in the package through an included dongle, and it’s 802.11b/g/n, so it can handle those high definition video files capably.
You can stream HD videos directly from your computer or a media server to your television through your network with no ethernet cables strewn about, though make sure that your router supports wireless-n for best performance. We should note that we were able to use EXT3 file systems, which will be an added bonus for Linux users.
So far so good, but playback had some minor issues: we found that bringing up the subtitle or audio menu can cause a video glitch which throws the audio out of sync for several seconds. Generally, rewinding for a few seconds will re-sync it, but it can be annoying at the wrong moment. Also, the user interface and GUI weren’t as polished as, say, the Popcorn Hour series we’ve looked at. Another small frustration was that for DVD navigation there does not seem to be a correspondence to the “Menu” key on the DVD-Player.
Picture quality was quite good and we were pleased to see that virtually every video format we have tried has been compatible including; DivX, H.264, MPEG2, DVD, and ISO images. Files with DRM are not though, and there isn’t support for RAW images, but that’s pretty much par for the course.
One possible point of confusion is the external MediaGate Wireless-N USB Internet adapter- though the manufacturer’s website has it listed as included in their system, other retailers including Amazon don’t mention it. What’s included in the box for $90 on Amazon is a power adapter, user’s manual & guide, remote, and a composite AV cable. For the price, it doesn’t get much better than this.
