For the last several years, I’ve been on a quest. A quest that has finally been completed. I can’t remember exactly when it first started, but I remember a happy time. I owned a modded Xbox (the original!) and it had a media player installed on it. It was called XBMC which aptly stood for XBox Media Center. It was an absolute delight to use. My gaming machine became my lounge room media player. It connected to my TV via S-Video as that was slightly higher quality than Composite video, it had a 100mbit Ethernet port so I could steam media from a PC in another room. It supported SMB file shares which meant no client was required on my Microsoft Windows PC, it just had credentials to navigate through folders and play the videos I wanted. The navigation of the software itself was quick and smooth. I could quickly jump to any point on a video, or fast forward and rewind with ease. I could even easily adjust the sync of the audio and video if my source was out of sync. There was even an official Xbox Remote and IR Sensor that worked brilliantly with the setup, so no death trap cable was running across the living room (unlike the network cable, but that’s another story). This delightful time ended eventually. Higher resolution TVs came out with their fancy new standard connection – HDMI. The Xbox was cast to the side, as a full tower PC took it’s place. Windows Explorer along with a keyboard and mouse was the easiest thing to use to navigate and play files. A VGA cable simply connected the PC to the new TV and supported 1920 x 1080. Sure, lots of the media I actually watched was still nowhere near that...

There are not many products that I’ve used and wanted to take back to the shop within minutes of purchasing, but this is one of them. There are many Android Media devices available online, but this was the ONLY one I could find that I could actually buy from a bricks and mortar store – usually a good sign for a product. In this case, I’m baffled at what I bought. The Kaiser Baas Smart Media Player makes some big promises. In Australia, it’s currently exclusive to JB Hifi for $128. Part of me wonders if this is because Kaiser Baas couldn’t convince any other store to sell this product. This may sound harsh, but after using this device for a few hours I’m not sure how it can be actually sold in its current state. I had high hopes for this device. Running Android 4.2, it’s a small box with remote that is supposed to fulfil all of your dreams of media consumption. Taken from their website: Enjoy internet browsing, music, video and picture files in full HD, via your TV. I’ll stop there already, because I didn’t enjoy it. Out the box, I realised it was only working at 720p. I thought that was strange, but wanted to see how it would play videos as that was the main purpose I had in mind for it. It plugged in and worked really easily at first; a minute or so of waiting brought up a very basic menu of options. Choosing the ‘Video’ option took several presses of the buttons on the remote, because it either didn’t register a press or delayed it so much that I was going back and forth over the icons until I eventually landed on ‘Video’. Successfully clicking ‘Video’...