MP101
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The Netgear MP101 was the first of a series of units by Netgear that links your digital media to your home "analog" entertainment system.
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[edit] Family history
The Netgear MP101 was followed by the MP115 and the latest in the family are the "Digital Media Receivers" comprising the EVA700 and the EVA8000
The Netgear MP101 is a small brushed silver unit that sits on your hi-fi rack and attempts to provide a link between your PC-based MP3 collection and your conventional hi-fi. Unlike most other home audio components, its narrow cabinet looks slightly out of place against conventional 19-inch hi-fi equipment, but it is well styled and looks hi-fi quality in every other respect.
The Netgear MP115 provides the same looks and functions as the MP101 but adds video support.
The EVA700 moves to a more conventional DVD-player styling, but effectively has the same features as the MP115.
The EVA8000 follows the EVA700 form factor but adds in HD compatibility, and the ability to read directly off a media share. [May be available on the EVA700]
[edit] Concept
The concept isn't new, and whilst there are now many other units on the market that do the same thing, Netgear was one of the first "networking" companies to get into this market segment. That said, they didn't really make this, it was designed by a company called "Digital5" and branded Netgear.
The concept is simple, Why should your digital content live on your PC and your CDs in your hi-fi, why can't you play MP3s on a hi-fi system, after all it's your music.
Put simply, this can be seen as an overgrown CD jukebox, and simply choose your music and it plays. What makes the concept more interesting is the fact you can use MP3 player features on your CD collection. Playlists, searching your entire collection by Title, Artist or Genre are easily accomplished, something that would be difficult with a conventional CD collection. It's also an easy way to share the families music collection, just set up one PC with all your music on and you could place MP101's all over the house, each one playing different songs in different rooms.
However it's not quite as simple as that, the main problem with the MP101 is that it needs a host PC, whilst some other units (and the later EVA8000) can read from a Windows share directly (or a NAS device) the MP101 (and the MP115 and EVA700) require a PC on and running to provide a server to feed the music to the device.
[edit] Physical appearance and specification
The unit features a clean fascia with a large LCD display, which can easily be seen from a typical sofa to hi-fi distance. There are no buttons on the unit at all, giving it the sleek look, unfortunately this means every button needed is on the remote and it shows. The remote, from a functional point of view, has every button you need but it looks very cluttered. This may put some people off, but at the time this was launched only the more IT literate people would have hear of this type of unit and be the type of person who would install one.
The rear of the unit has a wireless antenna, wired Ethernet port, power input, RCA sockets and a headphone socket.
The system could not act as a wired to wireless bridge, you used one connection or the other, if you plugged a wired connection in to the unit when it was using wired it would reboot and use wired; remove the wired connection and it would reboot and revert to wireless.
Wired mode required TCP/IP and supported a 10/100 connection. Wireless mode was listed as 802.11b and 802.11g but it only really is 802.11b and would only connect to a 802.11g access point if it was set up to work as dual g/b mode.
[edit] In use
Netgear say setting the MP101 up is simple: install the software, select your music and let the server component index it, and then turn on the MP101, It will hunt out the server and your ready to go.
It could be that simple, but invariably wasn't. Routers, hubs and switches all pass (or don't pass) the MP101's broadcast search so sometimes the server could not be seen. By default the unit was DHCP-enabled, and this could present some problems, and static IP addresses were usually required to make it work well. The server software was sensitive to the PC in use, it really had to be a dedicated PC, not a general use PC, so it could stream the music reliable, and sometime it locks up for no reason. The software didn't require a high-spec PC, it just had to be dedicated to the server use when you were listening to music.
For this reason many people started to use the TwonkyVision MusicServer Software [This has now been superseded by the paid for TwonkyMediaServer] as a way of getting the music to the media player. This solved may of the problems getting the server to talk to the network, and also was more stable and less subject to the demands on the PC.
Whilst on use playing music the unit was pretty easy to navigate using menus and a mobile phone–style choice mechanism, (press "1" once for "a", twice for "b", three times for "c" etc.). The LCD display meant you didn't need a TV on to see your selection, something that was common on other similar devices at the time and the quality was pretty good, as long as you had a decent quality MP3 to start with. One of the bigger problems for me was that the ID3 tags on the MP3s they had to be correct, or you had a list of "Track 01" in your playlist.
Where it really shines is it can easily be moved, and put in whatever room (or in the garden) where we had the speakers.
The unit was sold as compatible with internet radio and some protected content, but in reality it still needs the server-side component on the PC to act as a gateway even for internet radio. In addition the Netgear software limited you to vTuner radio (with the addition of Rhapsody if you were in the U.S. and a Rhapsody subscriber). Twonky's MusicServer let you pick up almost anything you could get via Shoutcast, but the unit still requires a host PC. Music-wise, if your PC can play it the MP101 can usually play it (with the notable exception of iTunes-sourced AAC-coded files.)
[edit] Implementation
The MP101 is based on the ARM9 Marvell Libertas 88W8510H system-on-a-chip and has 8 MB of DRAM.
The MP101 runs the open-source eCos real-time operating system. The source code is made available by Netgear from their web site [1]. Netgear also licensed the ARM MP3 Decoder software for the device.
[edit] Conclusion
After all the problems I had getting it to work, once setup and running it performed very well, far better than I expected from it. However ultimately I switched to a Turtle Beach AudioTron, as having to dedicate a PC to the unit and leave that running seemed excessive when I had NAS servers in the house that I could use instead. The AudioTron can also do internet radio with nothing but the internet connection on.
