Home Theater
Today Amazon released a refresh of its Fire TV media player and mini-console. The original device was unveiled in April 2014 and the 2015 version sees some upgrades in the internal components and connectivity. The biggest change is the upgrade from the original Snapdragon 600 to MediaTek's new MT8173 SoC. The MT8173 was originally announced at MWC this year and surprised a lot of people as the Taiwanese semiconductor vendor was the first to show off working prototypes with ARM's new Cortex A72 CPU core, and it seems the Fire TV is the first device to ship with the new SoC and CPU architecture. Fire TV (2014) Fire TV (2015) SoC Qualcomm APQ8064 Snapdragon 600 4x Krait 300 @ 1.7GHz Adreno 320 @ 400MHz MediaTek MT8173C 2x Cortex A72 @...
Dune HD Pro : A Premium Entertainment System using the Sigma Designs SMP8910
Dune HD is one of the most respected middleware developers in the media player scene. By exclusively restricting themselves to Sigma Designs, they have managed to produce an...
2 by Ganesh T S on 1/12/2012
Google TV Goes ARM with Marvell's ARMADA 1500
It wouldn't be far off the mark to call Google TV as one of the unmitigated disasters of 2010 - 2011. Through the failure of the Logitech Revue, it...
37 by Ganesh T S on 1/5/2012
Netgear NTV200 : Over-the-Top Streaming for Non-Networked TVs
The current flux in the television market is embodied by the emergence of two closely related categories, namely, the Smart TV and the connected TV. While the former category...
24 by Ganesh T S on 12/22/2011
Syabas Launches Popcorn Hour C-300
Syabas launched the second generation version of their BDA licensed unit, the Popcorn Hour C-300 today. The previous version was based on Sigma's SMP 8643, and the C-300 is based...
6 by Ganesh T S on 12/6/2011
Zotac Introduces Passively Cooled GTS 450 Zone Edition
Passively cooled high performance GPUs are quite popular with the HTPC community. NVIDIA GPUs are preferred by many HTPC users because of good software support (LAV CUVID, for example...
25 by Ganesh T S on 11/23/2011
2011 Media Streamer Roundup : Netgear NTV550, A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD2 and the Boxee Box
In the last year or so, three major SoC manufacturers vied for market share in the media streamer market. While Intel's CE41xx took the high end path with design...
43 by Ganesh T S on 11/20/2011
Updates on the Netgear NTV 550
As followers of the media streamer reviews on AnandTech already know, I have been in possession of a review unit of the Netgear NTV 550 since CES. It was...
22 by Ganesh T S on 5/7/2011
Hauppauge Colossus: HD PVR with HDMI Support
When Hauppauge introduced the original HD PVR in 2008 its component plus TOSLINK (optical S/PDIF) capture of 5.1 Dolby Digital and up to 1080i analog video was a revolutionary...
62 by Andrew Van Til on 4/14/2011
Nixeus Fusion XS Brings Marvell into the DMA Market
The DMA (Digital Media Adapter) aka media streamer market has been dominated by Sigma Designs, Realtek and of late, the Intel CE 4xxx series. The low end market is...
15 by Ganesh T S on 3/11/2011
TViX Slim S1 : Bidding Adieu to the Realtek RTD1283
In the competitive media streamer market, we have been covering products with a huge US presence. Today, we will look at an offering from DViCO in the TViX series...
10 by Ganesh T S on 3/8/2011
Nixeus Fusion HD Review
The media streamer market is a highly competitive one, where you have the big players like Western Digital and Netgear, and the really small ones like Micca. None of...
32 by Ganesh T S on 3/4/2011
Netgear 3DHD Wireless Home Theatre Networking Kit
NETGEAR has introduced their latest 4x4 MIMO wireless bridge device designed specifically for video data. This isn't an area where we've focused a lot of time in the past...
37 by Cameron Butterfield on 2/25/2011
A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD2 - First Realtek 1185 Media Streamer in the Wild!
AnandTech started covering the media streamer market last year. Thanks to the support of readers like you, the response has been very encouraging. Over the last few months, manufacturers...
31 by Ganesh T S on 2/14/2011
A.C.Ryan Enters US Market with Innovative Media Players
At CES 2011, A.C.Ryan, a Dutch company with only a small reseller presence in the US, invited us over to their private suite to talk about their plans for...
31 by Ganesh T S on 1/18/2011
ASRock ION 3D - A Next Generation ION HTPC
ASRock has yet another Mini PC in its lineup, this one makes use of an Atom dual-core processor and NVIDIA ION Graphics. In this review we will attempt to...
30 by Cameron Butterfield on 1/14/2011
Micca Slim-HD: 1080p In Your Pocket
Last year, Micca released a hard drive based portable media drive called the Slim HDD Digital Media Player (imaginative, I know). Based around a standard 2.5” notebook hard drive...
40 by Vivek Gowri on 11/23/2010
Netgear Roku XD: Streaming for the Masses
Today I have in my hands the Netgear Roku XD media streamer, the latest media streaming solution for the living room to get retail store distribution by allying itself...
27 by Alan Lueke on 11/12/2010
Western Digital WDTV Live Hub Review
Western Digital has become a noted player in the media streamer market over the last two years. Instead of resting on the laurels received for the WDTV, they have...
53 by Ganesh T S on 10/26/2010
Zotac ZBOX Blu-Ray HD-ID34 Review
Zotac has become quite popular in recent times for their entry level products in the mini-ITX motherboard, Atom / ION nettop and nVidia GPU space. Their mini-PC lineup started...
40 by Alan Lueke on 10/19/2010
Boxee Box: The Inside Story, Swapping Tegra 2 for Intel CE4100
Boxee and D-Link announced the availability of the Boxee Box for pre-order on Amazon today. At CES 2010, they demonstrated the Boxee Box with the Tegra 2 SoC inside...
53 by Ganesh T S & Brian Klug on 9/13/2010
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