Mediagate MG-350HD

I bought a Mediagate MG-350HD on Monday after seeing it at a friends place. Although aspects of the setup are difficult to use, for example adding the wireless is a pain and the file share thing requires a guest share. However, it is overall a very nice unit to use. Video’s just play and the selection interface is probably easy enough for even my mother to understand.

Mediagate MG-350HD

I’ve put a 750Gb drive in it, and I because of this probably won’t bother too much getting the wireless work. Just wait until I’ve got the house wired with cat6. I’ve been ripping my DVDs with DVD Shrink and AGK, and this unit is a perfect to play them with. Since I’ve already got a Solaris based raidz NAS, I probably wont worry about the NAS functionality of this unit, which is after only has a single disk.

The only thing I wish was better about the unit was a web interface and wake on lan. It would then also make a very good jukebox. All that said for $300, excluding the HDD, this small unobtrusive unit does a perfect job for just playing videos.

3 Comments

  1. Matthew Sweet Said,

    August 19, 2007 @ 12:50 am

    Hi Mate!

    Thanks for the review, I am looking at setting one up for my boss so we can get media approved while he is at home. A bit of a question, does the device allow me to download video from elsewhere on the internet? Say by logging into a web interface on the device and downloading via http?

    If you can help me I would appreciate it.

  2. stateless Said,

    August 19, 2007 @ 9:07 am

    Personally since I have 750Gb on the system, I haven’t used the network feature much yet.

    I think it is possible to setup a ftp, nfs or samba site accessible via vpn and allowing the unit to stream media from these sources. So

    You can’t use http from the unit itself.

    So the best option is either: 1) set it up as a NDAS to download media to it from a desktop, or 2) download media to a remote file share and stream from that.

  3. Steevie Said,

    November 7, 2007 @ 10:50 am

    The Neuros OSD isn’t as nice to use but does have recording functionality. Shame it’s a bit buggy.

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