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A majority of the consumers in this market have been spoilt for choices since they come from a HTPC background, and stress their media streamers to the limit (even beyond the officially supported specifications). Sometimes, they are pleasantly surprised by some available unadvertised feature (like the TrueHD bitstreaming in WDTV Live, which wasn't part of the initial specifications). Most of time, though, various limitations start showing up, both in terms of hardware capabilities and software support. These are dealt with in the reviews of the individual products. The end consumer needs to look at his requirements before choosing a media streamer. In addition, reviews on the net should cater to what the market really wants, and not rehash the marketing speak from the companies. Anandtech is working on creating a comprehensive suite of test streams to identify the capabilities as well as shortcomings of the various media streamer platforms. Towards this, we have identified the following features which differentiate the various platforms, both from a hardware as well as software perspective.

1. Audio & video container support (MKV / MP4 / MOV / AVI / FLV / WebM etc.)
2. Video codecs (H264 / VC-1 / Real Media / VP8 etc.)
3. Audio codecs (Dolby / DTS / FLAC / Ogg Vorbis / WMA Pro / HD Audio - Decoding / Bitstreaming)
4. Multiple subtitle formats
5. Interlaced video streams in different codecs
6. Specific video & audio codec quirks (such as weighted P-frame prediction & unreasonable number of reference frames for H264)
7. Maximum video & audio bitrate
8. Maximum video frame rate

Readers are welcome to suggest other aspects which need to be added to this test suite.

While this roundup article may not have an analytical conclusion, I will bring it to a close by listing out the platforms which we will closely follow in the coming days with respect to the above features:

1. Atom + Ion / Ion2 [ x86 + Nvidia custom HD decode engine ]
2. Mediatek 8520 Series [ ARM11 + Mediatek custom HD decode engine ]
3. Sigma Designs 86xx Series [ MIPS + Sigma Designs custom HD decode engine ]
4. Realtek 1073/1283 Series [ MIPS + Realtek custom HD decode engine ]
5. Nvidia Tegra2 [ ARM Cortex-A9 + Nvidia low power custom HD decode engine ]
6. Samsung S5PV210 [ ARM Cortex-A8 + Samsung low power custom HD decode engine ]
7. Telechips TCC89xx [ ARM11 + Chips&Media Boda series HD decode engine ]
8. Intel CE4100 [ x86 + Intel custom HD decode engine ]

Stay tuned for exclusive analysis of the capabilities of each of the above platforms from Anandtech in the near future!