Netgear NeoTV 550 HD Network Media Player Review

Legit Mods and Ends Reviews

NeoTV 550 - Netgear's Flagship HD Media Player

When Netgear introduced the NeoTV 550 last summer, their goals was to make a complete digital media server that plays movies, music, and photos shared on your computer or networked devices including PCs and Macs.  The NeoTV 550 displays and plays your media in full 1080p with HD 7.1 Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound.  It has a built in SD card slot as well as a couple of USB ports so that you bring over your media directly to the media player without a network.

The immediate problem for the Netgear NeoTV 550 is that in the past year or so, there has been a tremendous influx of media players and media streaming enabled devices on the market.  With a retail price of $199, the NeoTV 550 starts off behind the curve being one of the most expensive players on the market.  One of our favorite players – the Western Digital Live Hub carries the same MSRP, but the Western Digital comes with a 1TB hard drive for on-board storage.  The question is: Can the NeoTV 550 deliver performance to justify this cost?

Netgear recently released a robust firmware upgrade for the NeoTV 550 HD Media Player to give what was already a solid media player a few new bells and whistles.  Firmware 3.0.325 which was released a short time ago features Video and Audio improvements as well as a slew of multimedia streaming upgrades and bug fixes. Today we look at how Netgear’s newest upgrades compares to other top players on the market. 

The Netgear NeoTV 550 Featured Specifications

System Requirements

Connections

• Two (2) USB ports (1 front, 1 back)


• SD card slot


• eSATA port


• 10/100 Ethernet

Languages

• English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

Media Sources

• USB Storage devices


• eSATA storage devices


• SD memory card


• CIFS/Samba, NFS


• UPnP AV and DLNA Servers


• Windows Media Player 11 Media Sharing

Video and Audio Output

• HDMI 1.3a, 36bpp deep color, 12 bit xvYCC processing and HDCP 1.2 compliant


• Component video


• Composite video


• Stereo analog audio


• S/PDIF optical digital audio

Digital Media File Formats

• Codec format:


• H.264 HP@L4.1 up to 1080p


• VC1 MP@HL, AP@L3


• WMV 9


• MPEG-2 MP@HL up to 1080p


• MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP@L5 to 10 Mbps (Xvid)


• MPEG1/2/4 SD


• H.263

• Container format: AVI, Xvid, MOV, MP4, MPEG2 PS, MPEG2-TS, DVD ISO/VOB/IFO, MKV, ASF, AVCHD, DivX, WMV, M4A, M2TS, MTS, MP1, MP2, MPG, DVR-MS, BDMV

• Blu-ray (external USB Blu-ray player not supported)

• Audio:


• Dolby Digital (AC3), Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD


• DTS 2.0+, DTS HD and DTS HD MA (passthru)


• MP3 up to 320 Kbps or variable bit rate (VBR)


• Gapless playback MP3, FLAC, M4A, M2TS


• WMA8 and WMA9 up to 192 Kbps or variable bit rate (VBR)


• WMAPro, AAC, FLAC (to 5.1, 192Khz), PCM LPCM/WAV (to 5.1, 192Khz)


• Internet radio (streaming MP3)


• MKA

• Subtitle:


• SRT, SMI, SSA, SUB, TXT, DVD, PGS, VOBSUB, SUB/IDX
  

Next Page - NeoTV 550 - Box Contents & Setup

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Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 - No Sound, Media Player won't play media files, Photoshop won't load up

Date Fixed : 04.16.10

Owner : Ms. Sheila

Unit : Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 Laptop

Operating System : Win Vista and Win XP (Win Vista was Corrupted)

Technician : Drokz

URL : http://clhidohsr.blogspot.com

PROBLEM :

Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 with Win XP Operating system have problems with playing media files like to play music or play videos. It also made Photoshop CS to be corrupted and unusable. There was no sign of virus attack.

CLIENT REQUESTS :

File Backup (PDF, Word, Excel, Presentation, Pictures, Mp3, etc..)

Web Cam should be installed and run

Limewire and Photoshop should work

INTERVENING FACTORS :

Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 is lost

WebCam driver cd also lost

OBSERVATIONS :

Photoshop doesn't work

Media Players won't play any media file

Web Cam doesn't work

Can't establish a connection to the internet

TROUBLESHOOTING PROCEDURE :

- Since the laptop doesn't have any support cd (it was lost), we need to have a backup of the currently installed driver. This can be achieved by using softwares capable of extracting currently installed drivers in your computer. In my case, I used Hiren's boot cd and then DoubleDriver. It can easily be downloaded and also free.

- The requested files were then had backup and saved it in a 300-GB External Drive.

- It is now time to troubleshoot what makes all things go wrong. I then asked Ms. Sheila what was the last action she or a user has done to her laptop. She said that an XP Service Pack 3 was installed and everything went unusually wrong. There is a proper procedure in installing the Service Pack 3 Update at the Microsoft Support Site

- I uninstalled the Service Pack 3 from the Control Panel but the changes of the update seems to be already "permanent"

- Now the update might have possibly caused the changes, she said the installation was stopped and restarted. And upon restart, there was another instance of Win XP on the boot selection screen. 1 for Vista and Two for Win XP. The installation should be rolled back through System Restore. Here is the procedure for System Restore:

a. Go to "Start" Button then to "Run"

b. In your "Run" box type "restore" (without the quotations)

c. Click on the "rstrui" icon and run the System Restore

d. Choose a restoration point and the system will automatically restart to restore to the given restoration point.

- In our case System Restoration didn't work out. So we need another program to have the system files fixed. So I used ERD Commander to do the job.

- After using the ERD Commander, results were just the same. The changes made by the update could not be rolled back. So I decided to re-install the XP SP 2 Operating System.

- The XP installation was done and files were saved to the local drive. Also, the drivers were updated from the driver backup made earlier using Hiren's Bootable CD.

- The Web Cam was also installed and it functions well after the Operating System Re-Installation. Installed Photoshop and also working well. The failed Service Pack 3 installation must have caused the problems.

REPORT :

Failed Service Pack 3 Update of XP if not installed properly causes undesirable results like making other programs not run and or makes it not run because of its strict security.

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Cowon iAudio 7 MP3 player

The iAudio 7 DAP player has been released by Cowon. You may have seen them before with the ever creative iAudio 6 player. The screen is just 1.3 inches making the player very small. The screen can be display 260k colours. It now uses flash memory (8GB) rather then the 0.85 inch disk drive in version 6. Support has been added for FLAC and OGG. What impresses me most, other then the looks of the device, is that it has a lithium polymer battery which will last 60 hours. The DAP can be charged via USB which is great if you are out and about travelling. The iAudio 7 player will set you back $246 for the 8GB flash version.

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