Mede8er MED500X High Definition Multimedia Player 1080P DTS MKV [Electronics]

Most everybody's trashing this media player. I love it. An occasional blip now and again, same as I have with my computer or any other electronic device. I've connected a 6tb usb hard drive and not had any problems so far. I have the mede8er med10003d player. Just discovered it accepts a 4tb Seagate hard drive. That's ten TB of potential storage. Directory sublevels seem to go as deep as I need. I try not to go more than six subdirectories deep and try for even less only because it speeds up the selection process the fewer levels you have to contend with. Unless I find something better, this is the machine I will continue to use and replace if ever I need to. Squeezebox for audio, Mede8er for video. Personally I avoid divx because too few players and/or servers support it. I bought a special dvd to play divx files but lost interest. I prefer mkv and mp4, not as small a file, but reliable and pretty much universally playable.

I bought this product expecting to have a excellent multi media player for a good price.When I received the product I plugged it in and guess what- nothing. There is no internal hardware installed.I went through the ad and nowhere does it state that the hard drive is not included.Which makes this product very expensive and not worth buying now.

I am not sure why one would buy the MED500X for $239, when you can buy the MED1000X3D for the same price. I'm not really sure why I purchased that either. The thing you should be aware about the Mede8er is the have a reputation for excellent quality play back. No stuttering. Unlike many players, even if you have network errors or a very slow connection it doesn't tend to crash the player, just make it just freezes the video and keeps playing the audio until it has enough video data to start rendering again. In the end it is a much more pleasant experience than say watching something on satellite TV on a cloudy day.Now the bad. The navigation on the Mede8er is very poor. If say you connect to an 3TB internet share with movies and posters you have scanned, ripped, or downloaded, it is very likely your Mede8er will crash. You see it will do things like start converting all those posters in the background to thumbnail images, and that may consume too much resources to even update the screen for hours. There are a number of tools for the mede8er that help. There is TVRename, you can use for TV Series. There is Y2M for movies. There is really no tool that works for say "Movies with bonus features". Or say your folder of home videos... Both these re-arranging all your movies and tv series, removing the excessive image files, etc. With the Mede8er MED500X this is going to be even more complicated, because the jukebox only supports a maximum of 2000 movies, and you cannot nest folders more than three levels deep. So you naming needs to look something like "Z:\Comedy\500 Days of Summer\500 Days of Summer (2007).mkv". With the firmware updates for the MED1000X3D they have loosened this a bit. There is no fixed limit on the folder depths. Jukeboxes are still limited to 4000 movies, but you can make multiple jukeboxes act like one.Still if you have an existing collection of media, you will easily spend months reorganizing your collection to work with this device.To make matters worse, Mede8er reserves the right to change the codec support with every firmware release. Most companies automatically update to the latest firmware before shipping. So you have no way of knowing what codecs your Mede8er will play. For me the big gotcha is the Mede8er advertises Divx codec support. Most players now days do not, and I have 70% of my media collection in a Divx format. That made the Mede8er seem like an obvious choice. To make a long story short, Mede8er silently dropped divx support because apparently they never bothered to pay for a patent license for the device. So far I spent 2 weeks converting my tv series from divx to xvid. I can expect it to take another 2 weeks to convert all of my movie collection. In Mede8er's favour, they did provide link for a tool that can update fast in bulk. (Of course all the tool does is change the tagging of the video, so they are still violating the Divx patents by playing the video.) All the tool documentation and such is in German. The one part I could understand is where they told me to back-up my media first. A full backup takes about 1 month to complete, so I really would not save any time.

This is an excellent media player with top notch support. It can support up to a 2TB SATA II hard drive. You can also stream right from your computer over your local area network. I would suggest if you are going to stream, find a free NFS server like Hanewin. You can stream over UPNP, but the NFS server sends the data faster so you will have very few glitches. The server is easy to setup and there is a lot of info over at the med8ator forums, the company that makes this device. The only files that ever glitch over my wired network are 1080p blu rays at a very high bitrate and true-hd audio or DTS-HD master audio. These are the lossless highest quality audio files just like what they play at the movie theater. This media play does support these files as well so if you have an amp that supports these latest formats it will play them in full quality and not downsample them like some of the other media players out there. Any that are too high of a bit rate to play through my network, I just copy onto my 2TB hard drive I installed in the unit. Takes about 5 mins to install. I have read that with the wireless n dongle that is an option for this unit it will stream just as well as a wired network, but I cannot verify this as I already wired my house with CAT6 cable to have the most stable connections possible to all of my various devices in the living room. You can also copy to a usb stick or external usb 2.0 hard drive as the unit has 2 usb 2.0 ports and they are plenty fast enough to play any video file perfectly.UPDATE: this is outdated now and still selling for over $200!?!?. You can buy an AIOS meida player for $89 with the realtek 1185 chipset (one newer than this has) that outplays this one easily, much faster and will steam everything through the network perfectly without glitching do to faster chipset and gigabit lan connection. This is no where near worth what they are still selling this for. If you do get the AIOS, do a search for the pivos forums and download the R21 semi official firmware. The firmware the aiso media player comes with is horrible.

This is a wonderful media player and makes life much easier. You chose a hard drive of preferred capacity and enjoy the show! The hardware buttons and an optional keyboard is all a nice addition.

Upgraded from a 500 series to a 600, divix was removed after being listed assupported. I have 240 DVD movies I ripped to divix 5 in 2006 and in Jan 13 burned to blueray, none are now playable. In my opinion do not buy from this company as they can remove codex without notice. I have found out divx can be in avi,mpg,mkv and of course divx. what's next removing h264? Stay away from the 500,600,800.1000 series if you have any older content.

Does this unit wifi dlna player ready for MP3's and MKV movies from a dlna server?