Posted 01/07/09 at 01:07:24 PM by Paul Lilly

Cisco's making its presence known at CES with three new sleek looking web-enabled Media Hub NAS boxes. Adding to the sex appeal is a front-panel LCD and 6-in-1 media card reader found on the NMH405 (500GB, $400) and NMH410 (1TB, $430), while the 500GB NMH305 trades in those extras for a cheaper price tag ($350). All three versions ship with a single drive setup with the ability to accommodate a second drive configured as JBOD or in a RAID 1 array.

One of the main selling points looks to be the slick user interface accessible through any web browser equipped with Flash 9 or later. From within the UI, users can drag-and-drop files and folders or choose to upload them instead using the File Browser feature (doesn't support folders). Other goodies include a Media Importer application designed to automatically scan local and network shares and copy them to the Media Hub, and the ability to stream to any UPnP AV / DLNA device, as well as iTunes streaming.

According to SmallNetBuilder.com, who has been playing with one of the NAS boxes, Cisco managed to make the remote access feature stupid simple, bypassing the need to play around with your router's settings or setting up and configuring a dynamic DNS account.

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Posted 07/16/08 at 07:29:34 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Kodak has announced a wireless HD media hub that will mark its foray into this particular market segment. The Kodak HD Theatre player will do all a media hub is supposed to: beam videos, pictures, podcasts, music and internet radio to an HDTV. It will allow users to watch and edit images and supports up to 720p video playback. Kodak decided against a built-in hard drive, however, the device supports a host of plug-in storage media. Obviously, it will readily support other products from the Kodak stable like digital cameras and photo frames. The Kodak HD Theatre player will go on sale in September for $299.

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