Installing a hard drive is optional.  However, when a hard drive is installed you greatly expand the capabilities of your networked home theater media player.  You will have a convenient location to store your movies, videos, music, and photos. Your media player can serve as a NAS (networked attached storage) device.  You will be able to share the stored media with other devices on your local network.  And most players have the ability to download new media via BitTorrents, Usenet, or other online sources.

GizmoDaddy offers hard drive bundles for all players that support hard drive installations.  We use exclusively Western Digital AV-GP hard drives.  These drives are designed specifically for use in media players.  They operate cooler and quieter than a standard desktop drive.  We will install the drive, format it, and update the player to the latest firmware.  So let GizmoDaddy do the work for you.  Make sure you choose one of our hard drive bundles to get the most from your networked home theater experience!

Allows quick access to frequently used directories or media sources.

The player will automatically check to see if a firmware update is available.  If so, the player will then prompt you to choose to install the latest update.

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is a system through which Internet television services are delivered using the architecture and networking methods of the Internet Protocol Suite over a packet-switched network infrastructure (such as the Internet or other access network), instead of being delivered through traditional radio frequency broadcast, satellite signal, and cable television (CATV) formats.

If checkmarked, the player supports easily changing the appearance of the GUI by selecting a "skin".  A skin my include a background image, changes to font type and sizes, color of text, color of menus, etc.

You may configure your player to use a different font for the GUI and subtitles. Implementation of this feature varies for each player. Example: To implement this on a Mede8er MED500X, rename the font to "font.ttf". Copy "font.ttf" to the root of the installed hard drive, the root of a USB flash drive, or the root of a SD card.

A movie jukebox is a graphical interface to browse your movies.  Instead of browsing your movies by a filename, imagine how impressive it will be to browse by cover art.  Select a movie and view an attractive page displaying the movie's description, rating, director, actors, etc.  Additional information such as the year, language, length, subtitles, container, fps, audio and video codecs will also be displayed.  Typically you will use an external utility to recursively scan and analyze your movie library.  With the help of online databases such as IMDb, TheMovieDB, TheTVDB, Allocine, FilmAffinity, and FilmWeb, the utility will build your "jukebox".

If a player supports "index view", it will display a grid of your movie collection.  Each movie is represented by a thumbnail image of the movie's poster or cover. You would then click on the thumbnail of the movie to display details regarding the film.

Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) is an informal name for a class of video formats where each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is separately compressed as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, where more advanced formats have displaced it, M-JPEG is now used by many portable devices with video-capture capability, such as digital cameras.

Create "on-the-fly" playlists by selecting individual files or directories.  The player will then play the files sequentially or you can play the list randomly by selecting shuffle.  You also have the option of looping the playlist by enabling the repeat mode.

Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks at the point of the track change. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. This may be a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks segue into each other, such as some classical music (opera in particular), progressive rock, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.

The Ken Burns effect is a popular name for a type of pan-and-scan effect used in video production from still imagery. During a photo slideshow, this effect can be enabled to add life to the still images.

When a hard drive is installed, the player will format the drive as needed. Generally, several partitions will be created on the drive. This field is the file format (NTFS, EXT3, etc.) of the partition to be used for media storage.

Bonjour provides a general method to discover services on a local area network. It is widely used throughout Mac OS X and allows users to set up a network without any configuration. As of 2010[update] it is used to find printers and file-sharing servers. iTunes uses Bonjour to find shared music, iPhoto to find shared photos, iChat, Adobe Systems Creative Suite 3, Proteus, Adium, Fire, Pidgin, Skype, Vine Server, and Elgato EyeTV to share local recordings with multiple clients, the Gizmo5 to find other users on the local network, TiVo Desktop to find digital video recorders and shared-media libraries, SubEthaEdit and e to find document collaborators, Contactizer to find and share contacts, tasks, and events information, and OmniFocus to synchronize projects and tasks across the Mac desktop and the iPhone or iPod touch. It is used by Safari to find local web servers and configuration pages for local devices, and by Asterisk to advertise telephone services along with configuration parameters to VoIP phones and dialers. Software such as Bonjour Browser or iStumbler, both for Mac OS X, or Zeroconf Neighborhood Explorer for Windows, can be used to view all services declared by these applications. Apple's "Remote" application for iPhone and iPod Touch also uses Bonjour to establish connection to iTunes libraries via Wi-Fi.

DLNA is short for Digital Living Network Alliance, and defines a standard for moving movies, photos, music and other media from device to device. DLNA servers can store media in one location, and, without any setup or configuration, can stream the media to DLNA compliant players.

In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB, also known as Common Internet File System, CIFS) operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used to provide shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It also provides an authenticated inter-process communication mechanism. Most usage of SMB involves computers running Microsoft Windows, where it is often known as "Microsoft Windows Network".

A UPnP AV media server is a computer system or a similar digital appliance that stores digital media, such as photographs, movies, or music and shares these with other devices. These media servers use the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocols to communicate with other devices. UPnP AV media servers provide a service to UPnP AV client devices, so called control points, for browsing the media content of the server and request the media server to deliver a file to the control point for playback. UPnP media servers are available for most operating systems and many hardware-platforms. UPnP AV media servers can either be categorized as software-based or hardware-based. Software-based UPnP AV media servers can be run on PCs (Personal-Computers), mainly on BSD, Linux, Mac OS X. Microsoft Windows or Unix Hardware-based UPnP AV media servers may run on any NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices or any specific hardware for delivering media, such as a PVR (Personal Video Recorder). As of May 2008, there were more software-based UPnP AV media servers than there were hardware-based servers.

Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) is a UPnP protocol, used in Windows XP and several brands of network equipment. SSDP uses HTTP notification announcements that give a service-type URI and a Unique Service Name (USN). Service types are regulated by the Universal Plug and Play Steering Committee. SSDP is supported in many SOHO firewall appliances, where host computers behind it may pierce holes for applications. It is also used in media center systems, where media exchange between host computers and the media center is facilitated using SSDP.

Windows Media Connect (WMC) is a UPnP AV server from Microsoft for Windows XP and later Windows operating systems, to share and stream media on a Windows computer to WMC clients. The first two releases of WMC were made available as stand-alone software, and included a client as well. Following that, it was renamed to Home Media Ecosystem (HME) and the media server component was integrated into Windows Media Player and Windows Home Server.

By enabling the NAS functionality of a player, the player can serve as a NAS (network attached storage) device. Other devices (such as a PC, media player, etc.) can then access the media stored on the player's hard drive or attached USB device.

By enabling the NAS functionality of a player, the player can serve as a NAS (network attached storage) device. Other devices (such as a PC, media player, etc.) can then access the media stored on the player's hard drive or attached USB device.

By enabling the NAS functionality of a player, the player can serve as a NAS (network attached storage) device. Other devices (such as a PC, media player, etc.) can then access the media stored on the player's hard drive or attached USB device.