What happened to this market?

Not much worth talking about has come out. I think others will agree that 2011 seemed like a quiet year for media streamers so I'm sure most are just waiting for new stuff to come out.

For me.... My Dunes just work perfectly... Always did... Plus I converted many over to Dunes and I am not needed as much.

There's nothing really to talk about until the next generation chips are released.... Hopefully that will happen this year but who knows.

2011 has been very quiet on the media player front. Perhaps it's due to a wait for the new chips. I suspect a lot of interest has shifted to Smart TV's, tablets and so on ... The current media players work well so the real improvements might be UI, 3D and portability related. It does feel as though the media player world is in a lull. My instinct a while back was that the industry would become increasingly niche with fewer and fewer players. In other words I suspect it's a dying industry and consumers will move on to other devices such as the ones mentioned above or the game consoles. Could be wrong of course but I have felt that for a couple of years.

philip

As a newbie to the media streamer world who has spent a lot of time in the past month pouring over threads in this section it seems as if LOTS of effort and focus in the past year has been spent on fixing/debugging what's already in the market place.

In this situation a company is putting resources into an existing product rather than developing new ones. Of course the question is did they just rush to market with products that needed more time or was the core issue that they were trying to hit a price point that just couldn't produce what they were trying to sell.

From what I have read the Dune players seem to have missed many of these issues. But they did it at a price that was almost 3 times what some of the less expensive servers sell at. My hope is that now that many of the issues have been cleared up that the next generation might actually perform up to the marketing hype. But I'm sure that WD, Netgear and others are asking themselves if there is enough of a market to bother with.

Time will tell.

The media player world has been full of hype. Promises that never come to pass. Pre-orders to fund production, poor service, etc...

WD seems to have been selling quite a few players. Netgear not so many. The only streamers that seem to be selling a lot seem to be the ATV(), Roku() and those from WD.

I doubt you will see a change in the way most of these are marketed. Small productions, at the mercy of changing digital laws, other ways of distributing digital content, etc...

I guess it depends on where you live. The market for these things relies on content from the US for the most part. As the very highest quality becomes harder to obtain via the grey world you may very well see most high-end players slowly disappear. I guess that depends on what happens with the legal issues surrounding backups.

It seems to me to be a world with a different future than say a couple of years ago. I would be very cautious when buying a media player with no premium access. Unfortunately they are the best from the point of view of technical playback.

philip

Now that the ATV3 is out with 1080p, a very nice GUI, and stability, Airplay, I think it's game over for the small run production media players in the near future. For a complete audio/video solution for media streaming an Apple ATV/Airport network is the clear value vs performance leader.

Hi Mayhem,

For some reason I thought the ATV did not support playing DVD and Blu-Ray content with menus. Was I wrong about that?

unless something has changed recently , Apple tv doesn't have very broad codec support, or support for ISO's. Which would put it at a rather crummy bargain for a lot of people compared just to a roku or WD box.

If it won't play the same files as a WD box at the very least - it's value is zilch for me.

But for the Apple elite it is the be all end all of media servers.

You make good points. It seems to me that in order to have hype you have to have some sort of advertising. In the US I don't see any advertising of these toys where "normal" people would be exposed to it.

When I go to BestBuy I see WD Live, Roku, Apple TV and occasionally a Sony box on the shelf - that's it. Is it little wonder if these are the boxes selling in NA. The Netgear 550 was in stores for a while, but we know how that went. We talk about a lot of different boxes here but you won't find any of them in stores -- at least not in the US. The fact that these small company boxes survive and thrive tells me that the main market for them is outside of the US.

As you say, the market for these players depends on content from the US. That content is pirated world-wide, especially in asian markets. Legal nonsense in the US may eventually restrict what 300 million people can do, but as we've already seen, the rest of the 7 billion world forms a huge market for all sorts of electronic goodies that we in the states are not allowed to have. I think the media companies understand that the US, Canada and parts of Europe are the only places on earth they have a chance of forcing people to pay for their product.

Apple people never bought media players lol the stick to itunes, Most people that run mkv/hd audio,subtitles, video_ts,bdmv iso files will stick to mediaplayers as appletv is no good for that.

The media player market as it is now is stale, Sigma dropped the ball in giving us a more powerful chip the 8910 with better general cpu support and things like opengl, Intel dropped the CE line, ARM is coming around but doesnt have the playback ability of sigma nor the raw cpu power the intel ce line did, and realtek is still just hanging on out there. Until Sigma comes out with a more powerful chip or the ARM lines join the ranks with the playback quality we like of sigma nothing will change.

Very true. Especially for the consumers willing to tinker and hack them. I'm waiting to see how things go with the new Atv.

I do not see Apple as a player for anyone over 12 years old who like to do things their way and has the knowledge to make it happen. Apple will never support BD with ISO support. Most hardcore users like myself laugh at apple products. Their products are for grandmas and teenage girls.

I got the Dune it works great so i move to ANDROID tablets

Doesn't change the outcome......enjoy the tweaks!

LOL. Too true.

Let's wait and see what happens to Apple now that Jobs is gone. The last time he left they ran it into the ground with wholly uninspired products in short order.

Just to rub salt in the wound. I get at least one idiot a week that comes in my store with a MacBook that needs Windows installed. My fee?....$189.99 for Win 7 Pro, $129.99 labor and $99.99 stupidity fee. The best part of it for me is that now they have a $2500.00 Windows notebook that they could have purchased from Dell for $599.99.. Got to love the loyality of the typical Mac user In the real world Macs are useless for anything other than surfing the web.

True to some degree. Do we have a 1080p media streamer that offers the features the Atv does with a comparable U.I for $99.99?

Sigh, the kids are out for March break.

philip

I'm personally glad Apple has come about with dumb downed products. I have less occurrences of playing technical support for the multitudes of people who can't do the simplest of tasks and have no desire to learn.

It can free..but if it doesn't play BD ISOs it is useless to anyone serious about streaming content.

wdtv?

Oh I disagree with that statement completely. I'm not an Apple defender but I am serious about streaming BD content and could not care less about BD.iso. From the very beginning I've been ripping, storing and streaming the main_title BD.m2ts files. Menus, extras, BD Live -- I have no interest in any of that nonsense and just want to watch the movie. A full BD.iso would just be a waste of my disk space.

Same here. I pretty much rip all my Blurays to MKV since all my media players support it. I only have a few Blurays ripped to ISO like the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies. I have such a backlog of unwatched content that I have no interest in most of the special features that are just fluff nowadays anyway. I'm keeping a close eye on the jailbreak and XBMC install progress for the ATV3 once it's released. If it can stream 1080p high bitrate 1:1 MKV rips using XBMC I will be satisified since I have a Dune D1 if I ever want the full experience of menus and HD audio. Plus I'm pretty sure team XBMC will eventually figure out bitstreaming HD audio integrated in the main branch of XBMC. All this for $99 is pretty inviting for a cheapass like me who has already spent $100 on a WDTV Live, $200 on a Boxee Box, and $300 on a Dune D1. I really want the XBMC experience but don't want to pay for a full fledged HTPC after spending all that money and would make some sacrifices if I could get a decent experience for $99.

I should have been more clear.. Sorry. I too only rip main movie, HD audio and subs, but leave in an ISO. I do this so I can mount the ISO when I need to and convert to other containers. The point I was trying to make was that Apple will never give us the freedom to do what we want with our content let alone bitstream DTS-MA from a ripped BD without the threat of Cinavia. We all know how much Apple loves DRM.

I would say the WDTV is slightly under it. The only features that I would say put the Atv above it would be the Airplay, mirroring and music integration. Thats just me though..The only Apple stuff I own is an Ipod touch so I don't consider myself a Fanboy either.

I'm happy with ripping my Blu-ray into .MKV. I don't care for all those movie trailers I have to sit through when all I want to do is watch the movie. When looking at the specs of the new Atv Apple says it plays H.264, but it needs to be in a .mp4 container. I don't remember if ATV 2 did or not.


http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

Is that neccesary? I'm Apple elite and the ATV just doesn't do enough unless jailbroken, but what it does do it's excellent. So stop lumping all Apple fans together to fit your negative views.