I recently installed a cat5e cabling system into my new build house. At the weekend i bought a media player from Maplins, it is actually a wireless player, but i used the wired connection option.

The player is made by Nikkai and was a doddle to install and get up and running - even for a muppet like me! I was accessing photos and music within 20 minutes.

However i am far from impressed with the user interface on the media player, it is very dated in appearance and is quite sticky to operate, basically you have to be about 8 feet from the unit for the remote to work properly. The menu system is very labour intensive and is nothing like as cool as i thought it would be...

I have seen the Windows Media Centre demo thing on their website, but mine is nothing like that in terms of appearance and functionality.

Does anyone have any experience of these items and could recommend a good system with a better user interface?

I spouted off for months about how good this would be to have access to my PC files from the living room, but i have to say that on the whole i am slightly disappointed.

Any recommendations as far as media players go? I dont really want a hard drive version, as i have all the files on my main PC.

Thanks.

You want a to purchase a modded xbox with XBMC installed - fantastic bit of kit, it won't handle hi-def but near enough everything else. You can even watch streamed tv channels off the net and browse youtube/ bbc iplayer etc

I've got 3 around the house so I can stream my media around it. I run mce2005 on the server and with the media extender for the xbox (only released in the states but available on ebay) I can watch and record tv as well

Edit: you can also do the same thing with the xbox360 but obviously they cost a bit more than a £25 xbox

[Edited on 25/6/08 by Mr G]

Mr G - Sorry to hijack but is it a software mod or hardware? Difficult to do? I'd love to do the same thing as Albert and I have my poor unloved XBox sitting there unused....

With the newer revision boards/chips hard mods got a bit trickier, I hard modded my first box with a switchable chip but my other boxes (rev 1.6's) have been soft modded.

I've also done some a different way where you solder a point on the motherboard that then 'write enables' the firmware chip to have a custom bios written onto it.

Softmod is the way to go though if you don't want to open the case up and have to solder.

The softmod installer really does everything you need - I prefer the mod to boot into a dashboard then be able to select XBMC to boot instead of it going straight into XBMC.

I spliced a usb conector onto the end of a xbox controller (I had a spare bottom part of the controller lead that 'breaks away' ) then plugged it into my pc and transfered the relevant file onto a memory card that was plugged in. You can buy the leads on ebay though.

You require one of the following xbox games:

007 : Agent under Fire
Mech Assualt
Splinter Cell

Plug the controller back into the xbox and copy the memory card 'save' file that you just copied onto it over to the xbox hard drive.

Then boot one of the above games, goto load gamesave and select the one you've just saved and your in business for the automated install

Reading back on that lot it seems more complicated than it is - There are a host of websites on the procedure it's just locating the one in the simplest english


[Edited on 25/6/08 by Mr G]

xbox360 does it out of the box....

As does the Wii and Playstation 3 with the help of Orb ...