First apologies for this rather basic email but I can’t seem to understand or figure out the answeres for myself. Here are my questions:
1. I can’t understand the diff between the expander line and the Live player plus…is it simply a matter of one has storage and the other doesn’t?
2. I have all sorts of movies on my PC…some are PAL…some are NTSC…some are DIVX…some are HD…none yer are blu ray but I intend to get them…some are AVI…some are MPG…there are others as well but these are the most common…they have been downloaded from the internet. Can the Live Player Plus handle these movies? Can the Expander handle these movies?
3. I have a Sony 60" 1080p…I assume the output of either player can provide HDMI?
4. Can the player access these files from the PC’s hard drive via my wireless router or would I need to connect a storage device (such as a USB drive) in order to have the player play them?
5. Is there some sort of Windows Explorer or equivalent to search for files? If not, how do I select one of the many movies I have in folders?
6. Another file format question…can either player play movies that are in ISO format or do I need to extract them to VOB files first?
I am eager to get one of these players…it seems that for the cost, it would be soooooo convenient to watch movies using one of these devises rather than what I do now…convert from the many formats to an NTSC VOB files then burn DVDs !
@Skyclad: I can only answer the questions to which I’m pretty sure I have the answers to regarding the Live or the Live Plus only. Hopefully these are helpful to you:
The Live and Live Plus can handle the files you mentioned. More importantly, the units can handle mkvs even better, if they are encoded with Handbrake, High Profile and AC3 passthru.
The Live and Live Plus both have an HDMI output, so you should be fine there.
You can configure Windows shares to take advantage of wireless streaming with the units, although it is recommended that you have an “N” capable wireless router. It’s more beneficial to have a USB connected device to exploit the Live’s native access capabilities with that method of transfer.
You can browse folders on the Live much like any other operating system. If you also have thumbnails for your media, the images will display as placeholders for the media.
The Live and Live Plus can play ISOs without problems. The Live Plus has native DVD menu display, whereas the Live has that same capability if one of the pre-release versions of firmware is installed to the unit.
The Live can play a wide variety of file codecs and containers, but not everything. Nothing can play everything. The good news is that if it can’t play it it’s easy to convert it to a format it can.
The Live will definitely do 1080p HDMI
The “Live” part of the player is exactly that – accessing from the network, shared drives, or NAS.
When you use net shares you connect to the shared computer first, then the shares (and you can navigate among the folders of the shares).
