I have been asked on 3 different occasions over the past 2 weeks, "What is the best Media Extender?". That is a loaded question. To be honest I am pretty swayed in this topic, as I believe that a media extender should be able to watch live television. Many folks have Dish, or DirecTV which provide them with controller boxes at each television they want to watch TV. This is not really a media extender, as it is not attached to the network to search for media content to play on your TV.
For me, I prefer to have a media extender attached to Monitor that provides me with the most functionality and rich media content. Which brings me to the opinion regarding the topic of this post... Dlink, PopCorn, several others have devices that plug into the network and will search for content (.mov , .mpg, .mp3 ) files and be able to play them to the tv. PS3, Xbox, and other Gaming consoles do this as well. Xbox goes an extra step with their windows media extender that works with a computer running windows media Center Vista or windows 7. If this computer has tuners, the Xbox has the ability to control the tuner and watch it on the extended TV, as well as record to the main computer. The media guide is available as well as all of the other Rich content that the main computer can see. Now the Xbox can be a media player on it's own, however the Windows Media extender allows it to run the same program that you see on the computer but on the Xbox.
Main difference is do you want to be able to watch live TV or just stream recorded content?
With the pricing differences, you can do this with an XBOX arcade for much lower prices than standard network media players. PLUS you get a gaming system.
That's it for today.
Thanks
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