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. (more…)
