How Well Do They Work?

MediaGate MG-800HD: MediaGate’s device gives you lots of ways to get movies, pictures, and music to your TV. Here’s the stunner: When you finally get the MG-800HD configured correctly, it works as advertised.

When I first tried the MG-800HD, it found all the PCs on the network — mine, Judy’s, and my test notebook — but it couldn’t locate my network server. That was essential, because that’s where I store everything I want to watch.

Even after five years designing and manufacturing network media adapters, MediaGate sometimes releases products before they’re fully tested and ready for consumers. As late as spring 2009 — four months after the MG-800HD was released — MediaGate was still getting user complaints and releasing firmware updates. The help I received on MediaGate’s forum was terrific (thanks, guys), but it took a July firmware upgrade to solve my problem.

Nonetheless, the MG-800HD is a beauty. Accessing the network is fast and pictures are clear and sharp, With its Internet connection, I can scroll around YouTube and watch videos, play music from Live365, and tune in to Internet TV. Of course, now that the novelty of all that has worn off, all I do is watch movies and TV shows. And boy is that fun.

Not everything’s perfect. The remote is functional, but designed by the same orangutan who worked on the SlingCatcher’s remote (as you’ll read about in a sec). The layout isn’t smart. For instance, two of the buttons surrounding the Play/Pause button (see red arrows in image below) should control the volume. Instead, the bottoms stop the video and start the next (or previous) video. Unlike previous models MediaGate has released, the remotes allowed bookmarking anywhere within the video. This one automatically bookmarks when I close the file. And previous models allowed fast-forward to speeds of 32X, this one’s limited to 16X.

You have lots of ways to connect the MG-800HD to your TV: Composite, S-Video, HD components (Y, Pb, Pr at 480p, 720p, or 1080i), or HDMI (480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p). If you don’t have an HDTV, you can get away with the typical composite using an included yellow, white, and red cable. The MG-800HD supports 5.1 surround sound using the SPDIF digital audio output. And here’s a surprise: Because it’s connected to the Internet, it can also act as a BitTorrent client.

The delicious thing about the MG-800HD, in addition to being able to play high-definition video, is the number of video formats it supports. The standard ones are no biggie: .avi, .wmv, most versions of .mpg, .mp4, .asf, .m2ts, .mov, DivX, and H264 .avi. It can also play directly from .iso, .vob, .ifo, .tp, and .ts files. New to the 800HD is the ability to play the .mkv format, an alternative to .avi and .mp4, and more commonly seen; MediaGate has also licensed the RMVB codec from RealVideo. What all this gobbledygook means is the MG-800HD plays nearly everything you throw at it.

The MG-800HD gives you five ways to connect to the outside world. The easiest is to copy the videos onto an external hard drive and bring it into the room where the MG-800HD is connected to your TV. Connect the external drive to the MG-800HD’s USB 2.0 port, turn everything on, and start watching.

If you have an extra internal SATA or IDE drive, install it inside the MG-800HD. Copy movies from your PC to the MG-800HD and connect it to the TV.

If your network’s hard-wired, and you have a cable near the TV, you can use it to connect to the MG-800HD. It can also handle a Wi-Fi signal. My Wi-Fi router is close to the TV — about 25 feet — so the wireless signal was as good as when I used the hard-wired connection. Regrettably, the Bass International disclaimer is in effect: Mileage varies, so there’s no way to guarantee how your wireless connection will perform.

By the way, the MG-800HD’s predecessor, the MG-450HD, may be a cheaper alternative, if you can find one for sale. It has fewer codecs, and it doesn’t have Wi-Fi capabilities, but it’s adequate for most people. And it has a better remote.

Sling Media SlingCatcher: The SlingCatcher, using Sling Media’s SlingProjector feature, lets you play whatever’s on your PC’s monitor on your TV, and control it from the couch. So if you’re a Netflix subscriber, for instance, you can use its Watch Instantly feature.

On the PC side, Sling Media recommends the maximum video window size (not screen resolution) to capture is 1024 by 768, but 800 by 600 is best. You’ll need a fast PC: a 1.6-GHz Intel Core Duo CPU or 3-GHz Pentium IV with at least 1 GB RAM. SlingCatcher doesn’t capture Blu-ray video and it won’t work on 64-bit versions of Vista. It plays on the TV full-screen and the display quality is most times excellent, but depending on the source video, it can be just fair.

The SlingProjector software has to be downloaded because isn’t included with the SlingCatcher package. It took me about 20 minutes to configure the software and another 20 to understand how to use it. It really wasn’t all that traumatic.

It’s clear that the engineer who designed the remote hasn’t actually used it, and that was disappointing. The remote is V-shaped and awkward to use; it doesn’t sit comfortably in my hand. It functions flawlessly, though, because I can control the playback of the video on my PC just by pointing to the SlingCatcher.

The showstopper for some of you is the device requires a hard-wired network connection and a free port on your router. Silly, but true: It doesn’t have Wi-Fi capabilities (which even my next microwave oven probably will). [top]

Another downside is the SlingCatcher uses old technology. It was released early in 2009, but was in development for a couple of years before that, so it’s missing the ability to stream videos from your PC or server, as the MediaGate device can. While it can play videos from an external drive or Flash drive (which, amazingly, needs FAT32 formatting), it doesn’t have enough built-in video file formats to satisfy technophiles like me. It supports media formats, including WMV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264 and Xvid, and handles other mainstream files such as .avi, .vob, .mpg, .mov, and .wma. But oddballs — .mkv, say — are beyond its capabilities.

Yet for $199 (down from $300, on the Sling site no less, and probably lower through discounters), the SlingCatcher does a great job at streaming video from your PC’s screen.

Next week: MediaGate’s latest portable media player, where to pick up movies and TV shows.

[This post is excerpted from Steve’s TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up–it’s delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it’s free.]

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