Freecom MediaPlayer 450 well-performing media streamer with HDMI
We were pretty impressed by Freecom’s Mediaplayer 350 when it was released last year. It offered outstanding streaming performance and was easy to use, so we were keen to try out the new model, the MediaPlayer 450, to see what’s been improved.
At a glance there doesn’t appear to be much. It’s the same size and adopts the same design, though the casing now houses SATA hard drives instead of the previous IDE format. As before, you can choose to buy the product either drive-free or with a pre-installed hard drive at a range of capacities, though it appears to be a fair bit cheaper to buy and fit a drive yourself.
The most notable addition to the 450 is the presence of an HDMI port, which makes it far easier to view HD content on a modern TV, and is able to stream high definitions formats at up to 1080p resolutions.
As before, you have a choice of either wired or wireless connections, there’s a USB port to connect external storage for quick access and, of course, if you install a hard drive or opt for one of the pre-installed models you’ll have the benefit of storing all of your movies, music and photos on the device itself.
Unfortunately setup isn’t quite as straightforward as it used to be. While configuring a network is easy enough, it did take us a while to correctly configure the HDMI connection, which often caused the device to lose the signal. Numerous restarts and a lot of patience later, things were up and running, and you’ll find access to media available simply by sharing the relevant folders on your PC.
Pleasingly, streaming performance is very good and we were particularly impressed by the speed and responsiveness of HD video over the wireless connection. The remote seems a little more sensitive as well, and a range of media settings that includes aspect ratio control and audio track selection makes it well capable of handling different types of content.
In addition to media control you now have the ability to listen to Internet radio stations through the device, and although the range of stations available by default is rather limited, Freecom tells us that more servers will be added in the future for wireless access.
It’s not all good news, though, as it seems that something has been lost in translation since the development of the impressive 350. The 450 suffers from some annoying glitches, usually when you’re adjusting settings, that causes it to crash or freeze up. In some instances this required us to unplug and replug to regain control. Format support doesn’t seem as comprehensive either; we noticed a few files that used to play fine on the old model yet struggled here.(itreviews)
