Just picked up one of these off Amazon. This is the miracle device that I have been long seeking. It plays virtually all media types and formats that I have in my system, including DVD and Blu-Ray ISOs with menus and subtitles!!!

The box has a SATA bay for a 3.5" drive (up to 4TB) and 2 USB 2.0 ports for external drives. With the included USB 3.0 cable, it can serve as a attached drive to a PC. It has a Gigabit LAN  port and can share its drives on the network (mini-NAS).

The device also has a few "APPS" (e.g. JukeBox, Youtube and a minmal web browser), DLNA client / server functions and SMB support. You can setup password protected attachments to any SMB servers in your network, and it will automatically pick up any DLNA shared folders as well.

All of this for under $200!

Now I am seriously considering retiring my two HTPCs in favor of data servers front-ended by a couple of these sweet machines. No messing with OS updates, a/v software, backups and other maintenance activities. I now have the infrastructure required to store all my DVDs in ripped form. I could even retire my Sony changers (although video and audio quality will suffer somewhat - the KDLinks is amazing, but it can't duplicate the full video detail and sound modes of high-end a/v gear).

I have no trouble streaming any of my HD content over wired LAN - I get some stutter on the most complex files in Wi-Fi mode.

And so far, the only media types I cannot render are HDDVD and some weird avi format I once created from a home movie I made. Also some high data rate M2TS files I create from my Hauppauge HD-PVR play choppy over the network - but play smoothly from a directly-attached thumb drive or hard drive.

Oh, and did I mention that the USB ports also support keyboard and mouse? Even a portable USB DVD drive sort of worked a couple of times - but that is undocumented and not supported yet.

Their customer support is very responsive and I know they are working on a firmware upgrade - they have even solicited users for ideas on what new features to put in.

Only issue now is whether the thing is reliable. Time will tell, but for $159, it's easily a risk I will take. It only needs to last a year to be worth it. It takes literally 5 minutes to set up, with no maintenance. I love it.

Outputs are HDMI & Component video, with analog and digital audio (SPIDF and optical) whew!

I'm using the new version 6 beta of UNRAID which now supports running virtual machines (xen) along with up to 23 drives in a protected array (currently 1 parity, 1 cache, 3TB*3, 4TB*6). In a VM, I have an instance of Arch linux with Plex Media Server running.

I gave my dad a $99 Roku 3 box and using the Plex plugin, he can access all of my movie & TV collection stored on the 33 TB array. I currently have everything in MKV format but it handles it quite well, transcoding HD video down to 720P (optional). No transcoding for local Roku 3 boxes. Subtitles supported.

I tested the Roku 3 box on the LOTR extended edition Bluray and it had no skipping.

Just another option to bring to your idea.

Wow, I just finished filling up my 5th 995 :/

and I am at around 230 BluRays

I had to cut back on my buying habits

Been working my way around using a NAS device for storage and some kind of front end to handle ripping.

-R

Quoting leo1963:

Quote:
It looks like it might be as good or better than the Dune Smart D1 box I'm looking into.

My KDLinks unit is still humming along. Two firmware upgrades so far have provided a few improvements. There are still just three formats that I have, that it will not play: (1) WMA, (2) High data rate .TP, and HDDVD. Everything else I have tried, works like a charm.

For the WMAs, I used a free batch converter to change to flac, so that issue is gone. For the HDDVDs,  you have to open the folders on the disk and access the streams directly.

Still waiting for a fix for the high data rate .tp files. I don't have an exact number, but anything in the range of a DVD (8-12 mbs) I thinks plays smoothly.

It is a weird problem, because BD ISOs and all kinds of mp4 and everything else play just fine, regardless of the data rate.

The thing is so easy to use. I have also inquired as to the process for making an App for it. Would be cool to have a DVDP like front-end in it.

Still works like a charm, but I have no way to use it with mobile versions of DVDP or with DVDP running on the  Android version of KDLinks. Of course, the PC version of DVDP works fine since it can access any file on the network and the KDLinks hard drive can be shared on the network.