Let’s say you’re interested in playing media back to your television/home theater setup, but you’re unwilling to go through the trouble of building/maintaining a media pc and you don’t necessarily want to record stuff, you just want playback of materials you’re grabbing off the net, whether it’s legitimate stuff from, say ourmedia.com or archive.org’s live music archive, episodes of your favorite BBC show you’ve downloaded off p2p, or a rip of a DVD you borrowed from a colleague. Whatever it is, I just happened across a fantastic way to get this stuff into your tv for relatively cheap. Check out the Mediagate MG-25. $130 plus the cost of a 2.5″ hard drive gets you a fantastic, extremely versatile little media playback box and a remote control. It’s only slightly larger than an Ipod, it supports pretty much every video and audio codec you would reasonably expect it to, and it’s damn cheap. I can actually envision a use for these at work (instructors moving content around via sneakernet instead of relying on our flakey and overwhelmed network) and am going to try and get one in-house or buy one for myself. You can check out a review at akihabaranews.com as well.

[update]

A little digging has revealed that they have a new model coming, the MG-35, that handles 3.5″ hard drives and has an ethernet port. Even better! So far it’s not available in the US and appears to be a bit more expensive (~$220 or so) but the extra features are more than worth it.