QNAP gets in on the network media player game

A few of us adventurous types have hooked up a computer to our living room television set up. However navigating with a keyboard and mouse in a living room is less than ideal. There are other ways to access your home video library and web content on your TV. QNAP has its new NMP-1000 network multimedia player and it aims to bring HD content to your TV.

The QNAP has Gigabit Ethernet and can connect to your computers on your network. Gigabit is plenty fast enough for HD content. The NMP-1000 can support lots of file formats including MPEG2, H.264, MKV, M2TS (Blu-ray), FLAC, MP3, AAC, and plenty more. If you want local storage, you can add in an internal 3.5” SATA hard drive. The device has USB and eSATA connections so you can just copy data over locally. The NMP-1000 also can handle bit torrent (without a computer) and DNS. There is also access to YouTube and Flickr.

The video interface looks pretty nice (you can see it in the video below), although not as polished as Windows Media Center or Apple TV. The only price information I could find was on QNAP’s forums — the retail price should be $399. Street price will probably be closer to $300-$350. That price may be a little steep when compared to a full-fledged computer, but it depends on how involved you want to be with this home theater component.

Back of the QNAP NMP-1000

Product Page: [QNAP NMP-1000]