Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Squeezebox Duet Review


Got my hands on a Squeezebox duet the other week and managed to set it all up and try it out for a while.

It has to be said that this piece of kit is just fantastic looking. The setup was a little bit of a struggle, especially as the player (the small box that does not look like a remote) did not want to work with my wireless setup. After an hour of moving it around the house and lots of config. it still did not work so I plugged it into my wired network. I am running the squeezecenter software (the server side app that catalogues your music) on my laptop (with all the music files attached via external drives) and the Duet remote connected to this fine first time. It really is a nice piece of kit, however the performance is a little slow and the interface really does not work well with my 100,000 or so MP3’s. Pointing my pocket PC (Axim 51v) to the squeeze center web address gives a perfect way to control music streaming to several locations, and the web based solution gives me the speed and control I need for my large collection of music. If you had a smaller collection of albums (say 200-400) the duet remote would be fine no doubt. The cost of the duet is also fairly high (around 300 Euro). For that price I would need this to be perfect. Still it does look cool though. So I may buy the player part of this kit (around 130 Euro) and continue to use my pocket PC to control it.

Life with a WD TV


Well here we go, a short review of the WD TV

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=572.


This player is very small but very capable. Plug your TV into the back (HDMI or component video), plug in one or two USB storage devices (thumb drives or external HDD). So far have only had a problem with WMV-HD files (downloaded from microsoft to demonstrate WMV in HD), the picture is fantastic (at 1080p) but no sound. All my xvid and h264 (mkv) files play perfectly. Overall then a fantastic piece of kit for 99Euro (or less). I will work on a more detailed review shortly. In the mean time, just go out and buy one.