QNAP Network Media Player NMP-1000 Review

One of the biggest issues plagued by most is that we have 2 major multimedia players in our homes that each serves completely different needs.  Our home theater systems are designed to watch TV programs, movies and occasionally support some console gaming while or PC's handle digital media, downloading and storing of files, pictures, movies, and audio.  It is pretty easy to play these digital files on your PC but playing the same files on the home theater is a little more difficult.

The QNAP NMP-1000 Network Media Player allows you to bridge this gap using a familiar DVD style interface and power of a networked computer.  In our testing we were extremely pleased with how easy the NMP-1000 was to use and not once did we find a file format it could not open.  In fact we had some DVD ISO images on the network and simply clicking on the ISO launched the embedded DVD menu giving you the feeling of watching the movie from a regular DVD player.

Playing regular media files like .avi and .mkv was extremely easy and worked the same as if we doubled clicked the file from our desktops. 

The media player menu is not without annoyances.  The arrow pad on the remote works just like a DVD remote, arrow up the cursor goes up, and arrow down the cursor goes down.  Arrow right and you drill down, arrow left and you go back a screen.  The annoying part is that arrow left will exit out of any media file you happen to be playing, so in the case of watching a DVD movie if you arrow left on the dvd menu it will actually exit the movie.  We would have liked to have seen an exit button used when playing media files so that you can arrow around without worry you would exit your movie.

Total storage is limited to a single SATA disk but you have the option to connect to another QNAP NAS on the network or make iSCSI connections to remote computers.  Personally we never used the onboard drive in our tests in favor of streaming files over the gigabit network.

Easy to operate
Ability to play most any media format
Small form factor
Basic NAS unit
Remote disks via iSCSI
Connects to other QNAP products
Full 1080p video playback
Digital Audio
Gigabit Ethernet

Left arrow exits DVD menus
Cannot play DVD games
Only single disk support
No RAID option

We would like to thank QNAP for helping to make this review possible, please check out their website for a complete list of features this product has to offer.