Customer Reviews

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Brian W - Myka-  First Look

The problem with all of the recent developments in internet-delivered television is that they have a tendency to turn your living room into something resembling a messy data center, and you need to get yourself an engineering degree to figure out how to operate it all.

Enter Myka. A small device the size of a book that looks, well, gorgeous.

The Apple-TV inspired design is compact enough to fit anywhere in any living room, and it can be operated by non-technical people using a standard-looking remote control. No keyboard, mouse, computer monitor, complex software or related skills are required.

While there are several well-designed easy-to-use devices on the market, the problem with most of them is that they have very limited capabilities. Basically you are limited to functions that were anticipated and pre-programmed into the unit. DIYers get frustrated by their inability to add sources, or otherwise tinker with the unit.

Myka provides, out of the box, a usable TV-viewing experience for non-technical users. No PC required, just connect Myka to your TV set, pick up the remote, and watch TV, no engineering degree required.

But Myka goes beyond that. The operating system is completely Open Source (if you don't know what that means, believe me, those who do really appreciate it). Not only has nothing been done to prevent techies from playing with the unit, but in fact several features have been added to make such tinkering even easier (FTP server, telnet, Windows sharing and more). Technical people can add media sources and tinker with the unit to their heart's content. Even functions that do not yet exist in the world should be easy to add as they become available.

So Myka should satisfy both the technical and the non-technical user. A computer geek will be delighted, and his or her 7-year-old can use it to watch TV as easily as a cablebox remote.

Myka can play media files located on the internet, or on any PC on your home network, or it can store them itself. Myka can download files from anywhere, and store them for future viewing. It supports a wide variety of media formats without the requirement of first transcoding them to a different format.

Myka can play video files up to and including 1080p (Blu-Ray quality), without the need for a computer capable of getting you thank-you letters from your local power company.

There are some downsides. Some features are still being worked on. Playing Netflix watch instantly streams is still being worked on, though it will do so with the aid of third-party software running on a PC (PlayON). I'm told the manufacturer is having some difficulty getting the PlayOn interface to work properly, but it's working fine for me.

More sources are always better, but out of the box Myka provides enough programming to keep most users happy. The open nature of the operating system encourages developers to create additional features, and hopefully share them with the community (think iPhone app store, but for free).

For the technically inclined, Myka is a fully capable UPnP/DLNA control point/renderer that provides hardware decoding of just about any non-proprietary video or audio format. It has an internal hard drive, and 2 USB host ports for connection to external storage devices, as well as a downstream (type B) USB port for access to the internal storage. An RJ-45 connector allows direct connection to your home network, and it ships with an 802.11n WiFi adapter to connect wirelessly, though streaming HD video over wireless can be a problem, due to interference and other issues, as always YMMV. Network storage can also be added, using the included NFS and Samba capability.

The Myka is somewhat pricier than other competing units, but the additional features make the price reasonable, at least IMHO. You should not have to purchase additional hardware to create a very usable internet TV system that will fit comfortably into the decor of the living room of even the most demanding housekeeper.

Brian