Trouble with the MacReviewCast Server

Allison Sheridan here of the NosillaCast podcast, hosted over at podfeet.com. You know, I’m convinced that all media center devices are dodgy. I have yet to find one that meets all of my requirements and doesn’t have some weirdness to deal with.

If you listen to my show, you will have lived through months of ranting by me about the AppleTV. It was relatively inexpensive at $230 with a 160GB hard drive, but it was so darn restrictive with it’s insistence that the world revolves around iTunes that when Jonathan Cost from thinkmac.net offered me $50 to take it off my hands if I promised to shut up about it, I jumped at the chance. I had even done the hacks to it but that just made it weirder.

I use a Tivo but it’s a total crap shoot whether it will recognize my iTunes library or photo library from week to week, so inconsistent I’ve all but given up on it entirely. Oddly my buddy Ron can use my Tivo to show HIS photos every time he tries, so it’s clearly a problem on my side. It’s just too hard! We have a PS3 that we have started using to stream netflix and it probably supports sharing of content across my network too, but I’m afraid to try that – the interface is confusing for my poor little brain.

One of the main things we want to do is to be able to play our home movies that Steve has burned to a hard drive as DVD disk images; you see the VIDEO_TS folders for each movie on the drive. We finally broke down and shelled out the $500 for a Mac Mini about a year ago, after my Mac Roundtable friends convinced me that my discontent with the AppleTV was that I kept wishing it were a Mac Mini and no amount of wishing was going to make it so. We hooked up the external drive to the Mac Mini and now we can play our home movies. Sheesh, $500 for that? We also wanted Steve to be able to watch my live show on Ustream while he did chores, but for some reason the Mac Mini has decided that it doesn’t like Ustream and refuses to play the video in any browser on any account, even though it plays Flash content on other sites. Remember I said they’re all dodgy? It seems that all I’ve done is figure out more and more expensive solutions that are still dodgy, just dodgy different.

You might be wondering by now if I’m ever going to get to the point. Today I’m going to review yet another set top box media solution, called the HD Network Multi-Media Player from ALTAZ at altazdesign.com. This box is nothing like any of the other devices I’ve talked about, the most extraordinary difference is probably the price – it’s $100. Yup, the least expensive device I’ve found.

The ALTAZ unit is really small, maybe the size of two hands, and about an inch and half thick. It weighs practically nothing. On the back it has an HDMI port, a USB port, component video connectors and even a digital audio port. On the front it has another USB port, and an SD card slot. It comes with a very small remote control too. Now let’s really get crazy – it comes with an HDMI cable! If you’ve had to buy an HDMI cable from a big box store, you know that’s no small cost, if you get out for under $40 for that you’re lucky. Here’s another crazy thing – I opened up that SD card slot and was shocked to find a 4GB Class 4 SD card! I know that’s nothing compared to the HDMI card, but it’s another $10 you don’t have to spend. And if you’re of the component video persuasion, it comes with those cables too! Heck, the remote even comes with it’s battery!

Ok, so it’s small, it’s like, it’s got every interface you could want, and it comes with all the cables, but what does it do? This Multi-Media Player will do slide shows of your photographs, play your music and play videos. You don’t have to live in the locked down world to play with your content if you buy this unit from ALTAZ. I plugged in an HDMI cable from our AV receiver, plugged in power, and up came a beautiful interface on screen. Big giant buttons to flip through for each of the feature – photos, videos, music, text and network. We’ll get into those in a minute. The first sign of dodginess with the Altaz was while I was playing with it, suddenly that gorgeous display got all pixelated. I messed around with cables, turning it on and off, nothing worked until I turned off the AV receiver and turned it back on and then it was gorgeous again. That only happened once in all the time I played with it.

So first off I took a few photos with my SLR and stuck the SD card into the front of the ALTAZ unit only to be foiled because they were in RAW format. Well, I sure won’t hold that against the ALTAZ. Switched it to jpeg, and they jumped right on screen – absolutely GORGEOUS! Next I put some photos on a thumb drive into the front of the ALTAZ and those worked perfectly too, in fact the ALTAZ automatically does a little slide show for you with interesting and changing transitions. If you click the menu button on the remote you can zoom in on the photos (but not pan) and even add music to your slideshow. Very cool, very intuitive, loved it.

Next up I put some movie files on the thumb drive – an assortment of mov and mp4 files. Here it got a little dodgy again. One mov won’t play at all, several play perfectly, and one doesn’t play the soundtrack. No clue what makes the difference here, unless the ALTAZ somehow noticed I’d used the Peanuts soundtrack on that one movie? Naw, couldn’t be…

I hooked up an external drive we have ripped a bunch of commercial movies to for travel, and to my utter delight, the ALTAZ played the VIDEO_TS files! Huzzah! This is a real breakthrough. The only problem was I started watching Surf’s Up and lost track of time, a half hour was gone before I knew it! With great anticipation I plugged in the Seagate Free Agent drive that has all of our home movies. This is a weird drive that actually has no power switch, but the ALTAZ recognized it and it powered right up. Sadly though the ALTAZ couldn’t recognize the drive. Not sure if this dodgy effect is due to the weird drive or the ALTAZ but since it could recognize the files on the other drive, I’m going to blame Seagate.

The ALTAZ says it can recognize text files but for the life of me I couldn’t find a single text file format it could read on any drive, hard or USB. Tried .doc and .rtf formats, but it couldn’t pull it off. The ALTAZ can connect to your home network via Ethernet but my TV is miles from my router. The only USB dongle I had available was the one from my Tivo, which of course has to be another weirdness I’m throwing at the ALTAZ, and it didn’t recognize the dongle so I was unable to test. I thought about spending the money to buy a dongle to test it but I was too cheap!

Throughout all of my testing I have to say that the interface is an absolute delight. No arcane menus, no difficult to understand choices, all icons are perfect. The only thing I’d add to the interface would be a big arrow to the right on the main icon screen, because the network setup option is on the second page of icons, but I didn’t know there WAS a second page. I was reading the manual (and you know how I feel about that) when Steve figured out you could scroll to another screen. Like I said a simple arrow on that main screen and it would be perfect.

I had one more dodgy problem, when I was flipping through my movies, I managed to lock up the entire unit. The only way I was able to get it to react to my remote control choices was by pulling power on the ATLAZ. I’d have written this one off too because it happened right when I popped a side cover into place on the portable drive, but then it happened again when I was using a different drive. That was a bummer, not sure if I went too fast for it and confused it, or what caused the problem.

Its bottom line time. I now believe that it’s not possible for a media server to be dodgy-free, so I’m not going to judge the ALTAZ any harder than I did all of the other devices I’ve tested. With the HD Network Multi-Media Player from ALTAZ you get to connect your USB thumb drives, USB hard drives, SD cards from your cameras and probably network devices but that was unverified. They have included the HDMI cables, component video cables, and the 4GB SD card, all for an unreasonably low cost of $100. I think the ALTAZ media center is a delightful piece of clean hardware and is a great buy for what you get.

Tags: altaz, appletv, HD, itunes, media