It's no longer necessary for an optical disc player to be the focal point of a home theater setup. Set-top media boxes, designed to play video and audio files either from a USB-connected hard drive or streamed across your home network are abound from such manufacturers as Western Digital, Apple, and D-Link. ViewSonic has debuted their NexTV VMP75 player, which boasts full network capability (wireless support comes via a USB dongle upgrade), Netflix streaming, loads of compatible formats, and even an eSata connector (a rarity in this USB dominated world). As sexy as that may sound, all those bullet points aren’t very compelling if it won’t play your media, so let’s power up the ViewSonic player and see what we can throw at it.

I first hooked up a 1TB USB hard drive, chock full of almost every kind of media file you can think of, and went to town. While the interface for navigating through the folders on the hard drive was clunky, the VMP75 did pretty well in this test, playing MKVs, AVIs, WMVs, MOVs and even FLAC files. It did not recognize the APE lossless audio file I threw on the hard drive for good measure, but I won’t knock it for that given that APE isn’t the de facto standard that FLAC is for compressed lossless audio.



Link: TweakTown