I’ve grown tired of hooking up the laptop to the HDTV whenever I want to watch anything from the computer. The remote never cuts it and even though I use my Sony PlayStation 3 for a lot of my viewing, there’s some times when having a box designed from the ground up around being a streaming media player would be preferable. This is where the Brite-View CinemaTube has entered into my life and changed my media sharing HDTV watching experience.
Initial Thoughts
CinemaTube and Remote Control
has a line of plug and play media players to help you share your media from your PC to your TV. I recently received a brite-View CinemaTube 1080P HD and have been using it non-stop to stream anything under the sun such as Revision3.com’s HD MP4s and other media that I have stored on my PC and Mac. I connected the CinemaTube to my network via a cat5 cable and other than some minor configuration changes on my Windows machine, everything worked perfectly right out of the box. I was able to stream with the UPnP support as well as by navigating through my shared folders. If you have a Mac, the process is seamless and if you’re running XP or Vista you should be up in no time at all. Since I’m running Windows 7, there were some minor configuration changes. However, this is all outlined in good detail by brite-View online. I’m also sure they’ll issue a software patch to the device to avoid this work-around entirely. The unit itself is extremely small, light weight and easy to setup. Navigating through the menus with the remote is simple and straightforward.
UI and Remote Control
CinemaTube Remote Control
The CinemaTube’s UI is nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done. Two areas of improvement for the UI would be in presentation and organization. If you’re the type that has all their media stored in one unorganized folder, this system doesn’t have a good way for you to quickly scan through and pick out the one item you want. It just gives you a list of the files and you have to scroll through until you find the one you want. It does have a handy preview feature, but I found that to actually slow me down occasionally. That would be useful when looking through old TV episodes or MP3s, but other than that it’ll probably be disabled on my device. The good news is that the UI could be updated with a new firmware release that you can download direct to the device via it’s update feature. It’s not horrible, but it does have room for improvement.
However, the remote for the device is like gold. It makes interacting with the device simple and elegant. It’s extremely responsive and even though the UI’s presentation is lacking, the remote helps to cover up those imperfections.
Features
CinemaTube Back and Ports
What the CinemaTube lacks in UI, it makes up for in features. Pick a video or audio format and it’s almost guaranteed to be supported. Thanks to two USB ports, you can also use media off USB memory sticks or even USB hard drives. The device can work by accessing media over USB, your networks shared drives or via the UPnP MediaServer DCP. I’m looking forward to using an external hard-drive as the main source of content for the CinemaTube soon.
Playing movies direct from ISO files was probably my favorite feature of having this device. If you have your DVD collection backed up to your computer or a USB hard-drive, you can use the CinemaTube BV-5005HD to navigate through the DVD menu just as if you had picked it off of your DVD shelf and put it in your DVD player. Everything was snappy and the remote is full featured so it never felt like I was using a computer. It felt just like using a DVD player.
One thing to note about the feature set is that while you can play videos from YouTube over the device, it’s really reliant on streaming from a PC with proper software installed — so honestly, it’s probably not something you’ll even bother with doing. I could care less about streaming from YouTube. I can always turn on the PS3, my iPhone or look on the laptop for that. It’s not a big deal to have YouTube on the big screen for me.
Overall
CinemaTube Package Contents
Overall, I really love this device. It’s tough to say it’s a necessary addition to all the other tech under your HDTV, but it’s also not nearly as expensive as some of the other options available. It would have been nice for the package to include wireless build in and to come with an HDMI cable, but it’s not something I really expected at this price either. At the time of writing this, the device was on sale for $104.99 at
http://www.brite-view.com/cinematube.php. I’m thrilled it has HDMI, Composite, Component, S/PDIF, LAN, and 2 USB Ports. There’s a lot of competition for devices like this, but I felt that this product works amazingly well and I’d definitely recommend picking one up. One hundred bucks will let you be a couch potato even more efficiently.
Related posts:
- Goodbye, Analog Today mark
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
CinemaTube, HDTV
This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under Brite-View, Business, CinemaTube, HDTV, Internet, Internet TV, Review.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
#1 by Frustrated on January 17th, 2010 - 10:05 pm
I read in your review that “If you have a Mac, the process is seemless”. I have a Mac and have been trying to get cinematube and my Mac to talk to each oher but haven’t been able to. I have tried connecting to cinematube using smb://192……. and enabling file sharing with windows computer on my mac but nothing has worked. Can you outline how you were able to get cinematube talk to Mac seemlessly? Thanks.
#2 by Jeff on January 18th, 2010 - 10:01 am
@Frustrated : Thanks for your comment. I hope I can help you out. It’s strange because when I wrote the review, I know that I was able to just go to PC Media on the CinemaTube and instantly see the Mac. For whatever reason, this just isn’t the case right now.
To access my Mac without this, I clicked My Shortcuts and the A button to create a new shortcut (Add). I went through that process and used the IP address that the Mac displayed in System Properties -> Sharing. I was then able to click through to the new shortcut I created and access all the file folders I have shared on the Mac. (It does take a minute or so for this to open.) I have both AFP and SMB enabled in the Sharing options on the Mac.
I hope this helps, but if not feel free to comment and and I’ll do my best to help you out.
#3 by Frustrated on January 18th, 2010 - 3:18 pm
Thanks a lot, Jeff. It worked.
#4 by Frustrated on January 18th, 2010 - 3:25 pm
One more thing. Is it possible to copy files from my Mac to HDD attached to cinema tube? I have tried to use ‘Connect to server’ using smb:// but I am not able to connect to cinematube. I hope that you have a trick to do this. Thanks for your help.
#5 by Jeff on January 18th, 2010 - 4:51 pm
@Frustrated
Glad I could help. I know it’s kind of a hack of a solution, but it’s a solution at least…
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for copying from the computer to the HDD connected to your CinemaTube. I’ll ask some other people I know that own the device, but I don’t think there’s a way to do this.
#6 by Jeff on January 19th, 2010 - 7:48 pm
@Frustrated
Check out Brite-View’s blog at http://briteview.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/how-do-i-use-the-file-copy-feature-new/ — looks like they have a beta firmware that allows the feature you’re requesting!
#7 by David on January 28th, 2010 - 8:31 pm
Hi Jeff,
Do you have any experience with Xtreamer? If so, how would you rate one against the other? I use a mac as well and wanted to know how they stacked up against each other both in terms of features and mac friendliness. Thanks,
David
#8 by Jeff on January 30th, 2010 - 9:16 am
@David
To be fair, I should have said in the review that I haven’t used any of the competitions products yet — this is still true. I’d love to try more of the products out there, but I got this as a gift and it’s been pretty good so far.
Here’s my thoughts based on specs alone though:
The CinemaTube uses the Realtek 1073 chipset I believe and the Xtreamer uses Realtek 128X. The Xtreamer’s chipset is similar, but may have a few more advanced features. I’m not entirely sure what the differences are and would need to look into this more… However, I think for things like the video quality output — probably about the same.
That being said, I was pretty impressed by the Xtreamer from a purely technical point of view. I don’t think you could go wrong with either one. If the Xstreamer is easier for you to get your hands on though - it looks like a very strong product.