I bought a Snazio NET DVD Cinema HD SZ1350 many years ago so I could play avi files on my tv. At the time that seemed like the best solution. This product was good when it worked well but it locked up and needed a hard boot on a regular basis. It did do a pretty good job of playing internet radio though, even if it was a little limited in it's functionality.
Last year I scrapped the Snazio for a Beyonwiz DP-S1. This thing does an awesome job of streaming video files from my little Linksys NSLU2 NAS. It can stream music over the network as well but I never used this feature because it annoyed me that it stopped and buffered every song which is especially annoying on mixed albums where there is no gap between the tracks. It also has no internet radio. So I started googling internet radio players and after a few days research decided the Logitech Squeezbox is the best one for the money. So I went and picked one up and started the installation. It all went fairly straight forward until it came time to download the firmware. I had a good wireless network connection established but after about 1.5hrs it hadn't completed the installation and then just stopped trying. So I restarted it, hoping it hadn't become a brick (thankfully it hadn't). I tried installing the firmware again and it failed again. Only getting about half way through as indicated by the progress bar. So I hard wired it to the router and tried again. For a while I thought there was no action since it only increment in 25% blocks, but eventually it completed the installation. Once that was done I tried playing some internet radio and it worked great. I was really impressed with it's speed connecting to the stream and the sound quality was great. I wasn't ever going to use it to play copies of CDs but since I had Squeeze Center installed I decided to try playing a couple. It worked really well! I had Squeeze Center on my laptop connected wirelessly to a NAS where the music was, and also to the Squeezebox wirelessly, and it didn't miss a beat! The search feature works really well and is quick. And the best bit was that between tracks there was no pause. If you weren't listening for it you couldn't even tell when one track finishes and the next starts. Since then I've been ripping all my CDs to the NAS. This was good but I wanted to listen to them when the computer with squeeze centre was turned off and the Linksys NSLU2 wasn't up for the job. So after a whole lot more Googling and research I got a QNAP TS-219. About 4 hours after opening the box and the usual stuffing around and trying to get a feel for it I had SSOTS installed and running, and was able to play my ripped CDs without the PC on. And what's more it's response was even quicker than running Squeeze Centre on the PC since both the server and albums were on the same machine now. The QNAP TS-219 and Squeezebox is a great combo. All in all I've probably spent around 12hrs in setting it up the Squeezebox and NAS. It was a little more painful than I expected due to some of the instructions being a little vuage or outdated but trial and error or searching the forums for an answer got me through to what is now pretty much a flawless installation. It does everything advertised + more and I'm loving listening to my albums and internet radio from the comfort of my couch. It has even motivated me to rip some of my older CDs to the NAS and I am enjoying CDs that have been packed away in boxes in the cupboards for year. -- CannonsJS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CannonsJS's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=30431 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=63508 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
