Micca MPLAY-HD 1080p Full-HD Digital Media Player For USB Drives and SD/SDHC (Realtek 1055)

I do not normally write reviews but thought this product deserved one. I have used various forms of the Western Digital WDTV Product for Years. Being that the product was discontinued I wanted to find a cheap, well built, reliable product that woudl play all of my video files. I didn't want to worry about what codec it was, I just wanted it to work. I also am a Mac guy and needed the product to be compatible with the HFS+ file structure. I thought I would give this product a try after reading a lot about it online. I am not disappointed. It's simple, easy to use, and it just works! I highly recommend it!

I was fairly excited when I had found this since it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for to be able to simply view and play windows shared videos/pictures/ect over an HDMI linked TV wirelessly on our home network without having to mess around with setting up streaming services and everything else.Unfortunately when the first unit arrived and was plugged in no signal could be found and there just a blinking blue LED light on the front and no signal able to be found by the connected TV. I tried different cables, tried connecting up a regular monitor rather than a TV, tried updating the firmware per Micca's support page instructions, no luck.I had contacted the Micca customer support and they very quickly got me back to me in less than 12 hours confirming that was a defective unit and issued an RMA and sent out a replacement unit.When the replacement unit was plugged in again the same blinking blue LED light came on again, so back to customer support one more time and they again got back to me within a day and sent out another unit (no RMA issued that time). When this unit arrived one more time the same blinking blue light... The third time was certainly not the charm in this case, and I never did hear back from the customer support department after this third defective unit so I went through Amazon to make to the return giving the whole history of everything done along with the extra defective unit.While the product may have been exactly what I needed at the time I ended up having to go alternative routes and was out about $5 in return shipping costs from the initial RMA's.

Actually this is my second Micca. My son gave me my first three years ago and I loved it then and still do, there's nothing wrong, I just wanted the convenience of having a second unit in a different room. I'd been backing up my dvds to other dvds, it was taking a long time. I did this because some dvds were 10+ years old and some of them were starting to 'show their age' with playback errors. I was afraid I'd lose them. My son suggested backing up to hard drives instead, which would take half the time and way much less space to store close to the TV and wouldn't suffer the same fate as dvds in terms of aging. I found that was able to backup about 300+ titles per drive and box up the dvd cases for 'out-of-sight' storage (and proof that I owned the backup copies on my hard drives).Then it was just a case of popping a hard drive into a docking station connected to the Micca. The Micca displays the list of movies which are organized in folders just like on a PC. A few clicks and a movie is playing. No more hassle with digging through boxes of dvd cases to find what I want to watch.The rest of the story is simple, all the features found in a 'normal' dvd player are there to Pause, Play, Fwd/Rev. etc. to select subtitles and audio tracks... everything!The bonus is that the PC doesn't have to be running while watching as you'd have to do with the wireless streaming devices. And, with the new 'green' drives, there's no noise, NONE! not like a PC beside the TV, especially in the bedroom.In summary, having the Miccas has made my life so much easier than it was when I had to find a dvd, stick it in a player, and then put it back. It's quiet, not like my sons PC with media player running beside the TV. Easier to move from room to room than a PC would be (or buy two).... just a great thing to have if you have a lot of movies that you want to keep and watch 'forever'.Edit: after reading some other reviews I can see that some have not read the manual or don't have the mental ability to solve their problems by themselves.There is a difference between my 'old' and 'new' units. The old one begins with Movies and when Enter is pressed, it displays the USB partitions, and then the folder structure within.The new one requires me to tab over to the Files and press Enter to see the USB partitions, etc. Not a big difference.It WOULD be nice if there was a config option to specify which tab would be active when the unit is turned ON, I'd choose "Files". But this is not a big deal, it only needs to be done when first turned ON.The old one only displayed down to the VIDEO_TS folder and would begin playing, the new one goes down an extra level to the ifo file, so an extra click, again, not a big deal.There was one mistake that I made which was attempting to plug the power plug into the box. There's another hole very close by which is the same diameter and, on my first attempt, I got it in the wrong hole. When the unit wouldn't power on, I picked it up and saw my mistake, not a big problem, nothing got 'fried', but two holes the same size shouldn't be almost side by side. Why didn't I pick it up and visually verify where I was pushing the plug to begin with?... I already had the HDMI plugged in and that made it a bit difficult given where I'd arranged everything and I "knew" where the hole was, so I thought. My bad, not Micca's.The advantage of having all my media on removable 2TB drives is that I can pop them into the docking stations connected to the Micca or the PC. (Rather than copy from an internal PC drive or NAS box to a USB 'stick' to insert into the Micca, that's a waste of time.) Docking stations are cheap but so convenient, so spend the $.