MediaGate MG35

Streaming media the way it should be.

The Media Gate is very much a product of its namesake -- acting as a gateway to store or stream all manner of digital media to your TV and home theatre. There are a number of products like this on the market but most lack something: the ability to play certain formats, an intuive interface, or simply exhorbitant pricing.

The Media Gate however is very a much up to date with the times -- aside from being a photo album it plays all the usual music formats, including Ogg Vorbis which is a welcome addition, and it supports the gamut of video formats including from MPEG1-4, DivX and Xvid. It can even read VOB files ripped from a DVD natively, so you don't even have to re-encode your archives if you don't want to.

Of course, streaming the bitrate of a VOB file over the network might be a bit demanding depending on your network, which is why the MG35, despite its compact size, can take a standard 3.5" hard drive of your choosing. Plonk in a 400G behemoth and you can copy your digital archives to it, and then play directly off the drive. It's only PATA for now, but that's all you need for a device like this and will put to good use any old drives you have lying around. Note, though, that you have to copy using the USB interface like any other external USB storage, it can't use its 10/100 LAN for this purpose.

The MG35 has a few caveats that let it down -- the remote is piddly and fiddly, a poor equivalent to some of the remotes found in competing products, and its MPEG4 decoding is limited to non GMC or QPEL enabled files -- which, depending on where you like to source your TV shows, means you may have to re-encode them as standard MPEG4 before you can watch them.

This aside the MG35 has a fast, easy interface, can be easily updated over the network to latest firmware, and delivers all it promises for a reasonable price. If setting up your own media centre to do everything but record TV is too much hassle, the MG-35 does everything else and does it well.