Software Blu-ray / DVD players are bundled with almost all OEM PCs and a necessity for consumers who want to enjoy their commercial optical media in the most legal manner possible. At AnandTech, we regularly use the offerings from ArcSoft (Total Media Theatre), Corel (WinDVD Pro) and Cyberlink (PowerDVD) in our reviews. Each of them has its own pros and cons. While WinDVD Pro is the leanest and most responsive of the lot, it is also pretty barebones. Total Media Theatre, on the other hand, has a very good user interface and integrates services like YouTube in a seamless and enjoyable manner. PowerDVD has historically been a leader in the features department, but the user interface and bloat used to be a turn off for most users.

Today, CyberLink is introducing PowerDVD 12 along with an updated Android / iOS app. With the Blu-ray functionality not needing any updates, most of the attention has been focused on the mobile apps and streamlining the user experience with the PC player. How good are the changes? Are they enough to make us change our opinion of PowerDVD? Read on for our review.

Pulse-Eight is one of the commercial vendors tracing their roots to XBMC. Boxee is another company with XBMC roots, but, unlike Boxee, Pulse-Eight concentrates more on the hardware aspects.  The PulseBox, a Brazos based HTPC, is one of their products, but they also have a number of other HTPC accessories like Bluetooth mini-keyboards and RF remotes in their catalog. However, their most interesting product is the USB CEC Adapter. Almost none of the GPUs in the market have CEC functionality embedded, and this makes them quite unfriendly for integration in a home theater with a single remote control.

The USB CEC adapter from Pulse-Eight aims at solving this issue. As long as you have a TV or receiver compatible with HDMI CEC, you can use that remote to control XBMC on your HTPC, or, with software support, also be able to control other applications. What exactly is CEC and how does it work? What is inside the Pulse-Eight's USB CEC adapter, and how does one get it up and running with XBMC Eden? Can the USB CEC adapter be built into future HTPCs? Read on to find out the answers.

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 is being actively promoted by Google (and, till recently, Intel), the latter is in the hands of the usual TV manufacturers like Samsung, LG, Vizio etc. The popularity of OTT (over-the-top) premium content in the form of Netflix, Vudu, Hulu Plus etc. in the US has also aided in popularizing the concept of Smart / connected TVs.

With the upgrade cycle for TVs being in the order of 5 - 10 years, there are a large number of consumers who have yet to jump onto either of these bandwagons. This has opened up the market for an intermediate device to bring connected features to their existing TV sets. It is precisely this market that has made devices like the Roku boxes and the Sony network media players successful. Last year, we looked at one of the Roku models that Netgear rebadged, and came away satisfied. This time around, Netgear has decided to come out with its own device for this purpose.

In today's review, we will take a look at the NTV200, the next generation refresh of the rebadged Roku model. Can Netgear one-up the Roku 2 with its own product? How does the NTV200 stack up? Read on for our take.

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 wins in the Logitech Revue and Boxee Box, Sigma Designs and Realtek continued to retain design wins with their existing customers. Sigma's customers used SMP 8642/8643/8655 while Realtek customers migrated from RTD 1073 / RTD 1283 to RTD 1185. We have had media streamers based on these SoCs in-house for quite some time now. Almost all of them have been touched upon in one piece or the other. However, a comprehensive comparison piece was never published.

Read on for our comprehensive comparison of the Boxee Box (Intel CE4100), the A.C.Ryan PlayOn!HD2 (Realtek 1185) and the Netgear NTV550 (SMP 8642).

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, and long overdue, shift for the home theater PC (HTPC) based digital video recorder (DVR). Finally there was a viable option for recording DRM-free high definition (HD) content. The device was far from perfect however, suffering from stability (I RMA’d four personally); furthermore, as a large external USB device, it didn’t provide the most appealing form factor for many installations.

Today we’re looking at Hauppauge’s second iteration of the HD PVR concept, this time as a standard height PCIe x1 device dubbed Colossus. It offers all of the previous capture options while adding HDMI input to the feature list.

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. DViCO is a Korean company with a big presence in the Asia-Pacific and European multimedia markets. DViCO's media streamers / tuners / PVRs are available under the TViX label.

We have had the TViX Slim S1 in our labs for more than 6 months now. Based on the Realtek RTD1283, it was introduced in July 2010. The initial firmware versions were not upto the mark, and the unit went into the review backburner. With streamers based on the next-gen Realtek chipsets starting to make an appearance, it was time to dust off the old review unit. Our friends over at MPCClub rank the TViX Slim S1 as one amongst the top five media players right now. Is it really that good? Read on to find out about our experience with the TViX Slim S1.

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 these companies have media players as their sole product, because it is quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack in that market. We were surprised to learn of Nixeus, a Los Angeles based company, that was founded in 2010 with the purpose of bringing multimedia solutions to the market.

Nixeus introduced their first media player, the Nixeus Fusion HD, towards the middle of 2010. It made a big splash online, and there were many people on AVSForum singing its praise. The support was great, and reported bugs were looked into quickly. This encouraged us to get hold of a review sample. Read on to find out how the Nixeus Fusion HD fares in our stringent review.

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, but let's will see how well the NETGEAR 3DHD stacks up to a couple other wireless bridging solutions. Can you reliably transmit high bitrate data and video over a wireless connection using the equipment?

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 have been willing to talk to us about their proposed products in advance of their launch. This has given us some opportunities to provide feedback and make a request for features that we think are indispensable.

We had already talked about A.C.Ryan's entry into the US market in our CES 2011 coverage. One of the products that was covered in the press release was the second generation PlayOn!HD streamer. The PlayOn!HD lineup was A.C.Ryan's flagship last year, but that position has been taken over by the A.C.Ryan Fluxx. However, A.C.Ryan is continuing their PlayOn!HD product lineup too. This year, we have the PlayOn!HD2 using the next generation Realtek chipset 1185DD.

A.C.Ryan was kind enough to send us a prototype in advance of the official market availability later this month. The firmware is still a bit raw, which means we will postpone the review of the core functionality to a later date. Instead, what we will be seeing today is a look at the hardware platform itself. Read on to get a look at the first Realtek 1185DD based media streamer in the wild.

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 see if the ION 3D is capable of keeping up with its bigger brothers the Vision 3D and the 100HT-BD in the role of Home Theatre PC.

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, the Slim DMP could handle a wide range of containers and formats and had a 720p HDMI output. For the $59 (no drive) price tag, it represented a solid value and even without too many premium features, it was a very functional media player at its core. Now we’ve got Micca’s followup device, the $79 Slim-HD Portable 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player, which adds support for 1080p playback, FLAC audio, and a new UI. How does it fare in our labs? Read on to find out.

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 with a company best known for networking solutions. Does the Netgear Roku HD have what it takes to compete with the likes of D-link's Boxee Box or Logitech's Revue? What are the limitations and benefits of this particular media streamer? Let's find out.