Mede8er MED500X is my current media player at home. I bought this few years ago and so far feels happy with it. Theoretically it can handle internal hard-drives up to 3TB capacity, but I put 2TB hard-drive inside because 3TB hard-drives are still too expensive back then.
When choosing internal HDD for basically any media player, remember to choose the one with less rpm speed. Because generally media player does not need super high spinning speed even for Full HD 1080p movies. Having a 10,000 rpm HDD installed for a media player would be a waste of speed and only cause unnecessary extra heat.
Now let’s discuss MED500X features. First, it can play movies, music and pictures. The formats of music and pictures are pretty much standard, so everything in my collection can be player properly. Playing “all” formats and encoding of movies is always the greatest challenge of any media player. So far, I would say around 80% of my movie collection are played correctly using Mede8er MED500X. Sadly, this player can NOT play most of my movie collection encoded using H.264 hi10p bitrate, which is basically the most common encoding for Japanese anime.
As a media player to play movie files we already have, Mede8er provides us with flexible ways to access the files. It can play movies stored in its internal HDD (if we installed one), or ir can read movie files from USB devices (including external DVD-ROM) or SD memory cards.
MED500X has the capability to connect to files located in LAN. Initially I used this media player with network cable. Since I need to move it to a new location, wired connection was no longer possible and I purchased a compatible USB dongle for WiFi connection. With connection to LAN, Mede8er now can access files from workgroup, UPnP or act as NFS.
Mede8er plays subtitles reasonably well. This includes soft-encoded subs inside the file container (like MKV) or external subtitle files. When using external subtitle files, we only need to make sure that the file name is exactly the same as the video’s file name (except for the file extension). If needed we can change the subtitle color, change its size or even readjust the timing.
For the sake of completeness, let’s list other notable features of MED500X: cover art (looks fancy when I first had this player, but I got bored and no longer bother to deal with it for my newer movies), lock facility, folder protection, playlist function (not very user friendly so I don’t use it), time bar when playing movie, go to specific minute in a movie, screen calibration, zoom, video wall (not really useful), internet radio and some crappy file manager that I don’t bother to use again after few tests.
One thing I like from Mede8er is the firmware upgrade available from their website. They continuously improve on their software, and even a model from few years ago still receive occasional updates. One of their updates that I particularly found useful is the addition of watched indicator. When watching movie series with lots of episodes, this is very handy to quickly jump into a new episode without having to remember what was the last episode we’ve watched.
This media player is not perfect, but it does most of its main job well. I will continue to use this, until something better becomes available in the market.
Mede8er rules
buonasera robert io lo possiedo ma mi si è bloccato sulla finestra di aperture. e la spia blu sull’ hard disk si accende e spegne: ho provato in tutti i modi ma non riesco a risolvere il problema. E non ho idea dove portarlo per farmelo aggiustare, l’ho portato in due negozi per computer ma non ci sono riusciti.
ti ringrazio anticipatamente luca mattera