Sony streaming media player SMP-N100   by Iram

I’ve been searching some time for a device that will stream media on my television from my wireless network. The Sony SMP-N100 Network Media Player recently caught my eye as a serious contender. Given the awesome features promised, combined with the recent price drop, I simply couldn’t resist purchasing this device.

I purchased the Sony streaming player from the Sony Store Online, store.sony.com, whilst waiting in line to purchase one on Black Friday. I was actually able to purchase it for the same price as all the big box stores were offering it over the holiday weekend.

The concept of this device is simply cool; there’s no other word for it. I’ve got a Raid 0 DLNA media server in my safe, complete with wireless access to stream all my photos, videos, and music across my home network. This was the icing on the cake for the SMP-N100, as it had claimed to be DLNA certified.

I hooked the device up via HDMI cable, and I was running the “easy setup” in no time flat. Technology is great. Entered the wireless access code, which comes standard in every nerd’s immediate memory, and I was looking at my server, properly named “secretstorage,” right there on my tv. Have I mentioned that technology is fantastic?

This was a step up from my Western Digital WDTV, as I no longer needed to copy my media to a flash drive to view it on my TV. Sure, I’ve hacked the firmware in the past to allow a USB wireless network adapter to access my media through a standard linux OS on the WDTV, but that was complicated, and didn’t work well 100% of the time. I need something solid, something like the SMP-N100.

So I select a test video, video_10880.mpg, on the Sony SMP-N100 streaming media player. Unfortunately, I receive the message, “the file is corrupt or unsupported.” That’s fine. I’m still feeling good. Perhaps the file is actually corrupted. So I try the next file in the seriesâ