Once a person makes the leap and buys a high def television, they quickly come to the realization that standard definition video content looks ugly in comparison.   Providers of connected media players are all now trying to fill the void in their product lines by adding players that support high def content.  The Pinnacle ShowCenter 250HD is one of these players, and at a sub-$200 price point, it’s an attractive product. 

The 250HD supports a ton of video formats including WMV (including DRM), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD and can support up to a 1080i resolution.  It also has a nice selection of inputs including digital audio so it can accompany your home theatre setup rather easy.  The only input missing, which many people will miss, is HDMI but with other products in this price category such as the Netgear EVA700, this is par for the course. 

 The first thing I noticed about the product when I cracked open the box was how small it was.  It’s a bit bigger than a Nintendo Wii, but not by much and I appreciated the look of the box in my home theatre setup.   The one negative is the remote which feels pretty cheap and cheesy.  Many computer peripheral companies trying to enter the home entertainment market underestimate the value users place on the remote and it’s safe to say that Pinnacle didn’t spend much R & D to come up with something fancy.  It’s functional and gets the job done, but I think they added it in without much thought of how and where it would be used.

If you have a Windows PC with Window Media Player 10 or above, setup is a snap and I had streaming video within a couple minutes.  The user interface is functional but not revolutionary but it gets you to your content quickly without a lot of hoopla.  I threw a good set of video content at the 250HD, and for most formats, it handled it well.  I noticed some choppy audio in some of my 1080i wmv movie files, but by and large, it handled my video library well.  The one sore spot for me was AC3 audio, which it didn’t handle at all for me, at least using the standard stereo audio cables (it may very well support it through digital audio although the documentation on the Pinnacle website was spotty).

All in all, the ShowCenter 250HD is a good product, and at the sub $200 price point, it competes well against other products in the market. If you have a lot of video content on your PC server and want to throw up a lot of pixels on your big screen at a little price, the 250HD is worth considering.

I downloaded the latest firmware update for the XBox 360 last night which included support for streaming Divx/Xvid movies, and it really is a nice update and worked really well.  I threw a couple test videos the box and they all worked well, and the ability to change the aspect ratio on the fly was a nice addition for people who have videos from different sources that have different aspect ratios. The only minor annoyance is the lack of support of Divx/Xvid files via the Media Center Extender interface.  The Xbox has two options for streaming video from a PC, one called Video which works with any PC running WMP 11 that has it set up to share video.  The second is the ability to use the XBox as a full Media Center Extender if you are running MCE on your home server; that works well for streaming live or recorded television (if you use it as a DVR), but the video library embedded in MCE won’t stream Divx movies to the XBox.    You can still get to your videos the first way, but you need to leave MCE on your XBox to do it.   Hopefully they’ll fix this in the future since MCE is a pretty good product and when connected with the XBox, it makes a great way to distribute video.