Compro NMC 1000W Media Player

Last year when we were getting introduced to these players, we always knew that a super convenient product such as this could always catch on. I'm talking about those intermediaries that have come to replace DVD players slowly and steadily. Now we have at least 10 brands competing and Compro is one of them, with their offerings in the hard disk based media player space. This is the review of  their VideoMate Network Media Center 1000W model.

Design
This design is quite unique for its category. It has a quite a large footprint compared to say a model by Western Digital or Seagate, but it’s not bad at all. It’s got a vertical slim pad, slightly tilted back, completely covered in aluminum finish with a mild luster. The screen is centrally located on this pad, across its breadth and lights up in blue LEDs.

The rear panel is just a flat plinth for the erect front pad and is clad in normal black plastic. The connections are on this panel, which number to 3 USB 2.0 ins, one HDMI 1.3 out, one component, one composite, a set of optical and Coaxial audio out and last but not least, the Ethernet port (10/100) as this player can also play files off a local network, besides the 3 USB slots where one can connect a flash drive or Hard drive, in either FAT32 or NTFS format. The player also comes included with a Wi-Fi g module, something that is not directly included in other players. Another good option that is included is a Bittorrent client, which can be accessed by the UI.

The file systems compatibility includes:

• Video Container: AVI, MPG, MOV (h.264), TS, ASF, MKV
• Video CODEC:  MPEG 1 / 2 / 4, WMV9 (MP@HL), h.264(HP@4.0), AVCHD, VC-1(MP@HL)
• Audio Formats:  MP3, WMA, PCM, WAV, AC3
• Image Formats:  JPG
• Subtitle: SRT, TXT.

There is no support for .VOB files (direct DVD copy). The site says a firmware update will provide that, but it should have been there in the first place as the competitors support it, albeit all the competition’s performance in the VOB file space was poor. Also Images have only JPEG, no TIFFs, which is also a common file format. The current file list is still very large and impressive no doubt. The output res is 1920 x 1080, also lower resolutions are upscalable.