I’ve been using my V2 Linksys Media Center extender for a few weeks now and thought I’d post some thoughts on the experience.
- The form factor is great. It’s very small and utterly silent.
- Linksys include a set of each cables (aside from HDMI) which is nice.
- The included remote feels much cheaper than those included with V1 extenders.
- Setup was super-easy and the non-extender setup pages are well implemented.
- Startup times are abysmal. It takes around 60 seconds over Ethernet and longer via Wireless-N. Powering down also takes a surprisingly long time.
- Video quality is excellent for both SDTV/HDTV, as well as XviD.
- The menu and selection transitions are painful to watch. Turning them off gives a much better experience.
- On an HDTV, areas such as the menu backgrounds and fonts are of a noticeably lower quality than within Media Center itself, or when using the Xbox 360 as an extender. These differences are largely unnoticeable on SDTV.
- There is no 4th Zoom option for watching a 4/3 video on a widescreen TV.
- All of the Media Center backgrounds, menus, and text appear embedded in the firmware. Due to this I feel it’s unlikely V2 extenders will be supported on the next major release of Media Center (and since the hardware already appears underpowered, this may not be a bad thing).
Overall I would say I’m neither impressed nor disappointed with the new extenders. The experience is generally very good (once you turn off the transition animations) but at $250+ they feel overpriced and the startup time is disappointing.
If you’re looking for an extender for the living room, particularly for an HDTV, then I’d suggest considering an XBox 360 (particularly the quieter model, or if you have a cabinet to muffle the fan sound). For a second extender in the bedroom then the Linksys V2 extenders are a good choice.
Footnote: I believe that the forthcoming extenders from companies such as D-Link are all based upon the same internal hardware, so the experiences are unlikely to differ much.
2008/05/04, 10:08
Hello, I was wondering if you can also power down the media center with this extender (or any other like xbox360). For example I watch a movie in my bedroom and go to sleep. I don’t want my media center in the office to keep using energy. Is it possible to turn it off…and even beter turn it on too?
2008/05/05, 13:44
Hi Dimi,
The media center will come out of sleep mode (and be prevented from sleeping) when you’re using an extender. I don’t think it will automatically power-off afterwards but your regular power-saving options will then kick in.
2008/05/10, 12:58
Hi Andrew, great blog btw. I’m hunting around for the best solution for centralising my data, decent backup and buying a media centre extender. I’ve experimented with a standalone PC in the living room…to big and noisy, I’ve looked at the thecus range of RAID NAS and was going to get a 5200 but then pairing it with a decent extender/streamer was the problem. The best ones appear to need custom software on your PC or expect you to leave your PC on all the time so that it can access content on the NAS box via the Vista PC (DMA 2100/2200). This means I’ll then have 2 boxes on all the time. The DMA 2100 appears to be a good choice but can you access a Microsoft home media server box directly with the 2100? Or, will I still have to leave my vista PC on all the time. Cheers, Crom
2008/05/19, 00:20
Hi Crom,
Unfortunately the DM2100 is just an extender so needs to connect to a Vista machine running Windows Media Center.
At the moment my number one recommendation for anyone looking to play stream content from a server or NAS would have to be a modded AppleTV.
I recently purchased one for this purpose and I’m very very happy with it. It took about 15 minutes to enable SSH and another 10 minutes to install the plugins needed to play a wide range of codecs. Getting network shares mounted (or more accurately staying mounted after a reboot) was a bit trickier but not much.
I’m planning a couple of blog posts around this soon.