The best media streamers

Round-up by: Ian Morris

Last updated: 06 Oct 2008

If you've got video on your computer from DVDs, home movies you've shot or TV programmes you've recorded on a TV capture card, you might want a way to watch them on your TV. The device that does this is called a media streamer, and there are a number of them available.

While us geeks get very excited about streaming video from our computers to our TV in the lounge, it's not something that has yet hit the mainstream. That said, with iPlayer, Kangaroo and a multitude of other digital services on the horizon, we would hope that eventually these devices will handle content from these places and allow you to watch on your TV with minimal fuss and without installing a million different applications on your PC.

First on the list is the D-Link DSM-330, otherwise known as the DivX Connected box. This was one of the best media streamers we'd seen at the time and it does still have a lot to offer, but it's much more limited than the others we've looked at. For a start, it only does 720p HD, which isn't a massive problem. But the D-Link won't currently play much apart from MPEG-4 contained in AVI files, which really limits your choices.

The Popcorn Hour A-100 was the first streamer we saw that really could do everything. This machine is simple to use, will allow you to watch pretty much any type of video file you can lay your hands on, and it won't break the bank, either. If you put a hard drive in the Popcorn Hour you can transfer files to it using FTP over your network, which means you don't have to leave a computer on all the time.

If you're looking for something that looks different, the DVICO TViX HD M-6500A is probably a good starting place. We like the fact that it's got a built-in display, space for an SATA drive and an attractive user interface. What we don't care for is the high price and highly irritating media sharing application for the PC where you keep your video and music.

And finally, the best of the bunch: the Popcorn Hour A-110 does everything you could hope for, as well as adding some nice touches over the A-100. For example, it can now decode DTS audio, which means you can listen to movies with these soundtracks on your TV, without any extra hardware. The A-110 also swaps the IDE disk connection of the A-100 with a more modern SATA one.

We suggest the A-110 is the best buy of all these streamers, although the D-Link is fantastically cheap and quite capable if you don't care about HD content that much.

Edited by Marian Smith