A Cheap and Easy Network Digital Media Player?

hethatishere asks: "Does such a thing exist? Better yet, is it easy enough for my parents to use? PRISMIQ seems to offer a pretty good one, but it has very limited codec support. D-Link also offers a wireless Media player, but it too struggles with the copious number of codecs available. So is there a cheap and affordable Wireless Networked Media Player, that supports most if not all common and advanced codecs (DivX, XviD, and various wrappers like MKV and OGG, etc), or is this still a pipe dream?"

Squeeze Box

[MJArrison]

A Squeeze Box [slimdevices.com] is exactly what you're looking for. I got one a few months ago. It is a god send. Both wired and wireless versions are available. It's a little more expensive than the major brand counterparts that you mentioned, but it is:

• totally open sourced
  
• served with perl
  
• capable of every codec imaginary
  
• capable of digital and analog output
  

I love it!

DLINK DSM320

[szyzyg]

Is a PoS 90% of users won't get much use from it.... but as a hacker I've got it doing exactly what I want - it's a linux system so it's possible to get your own apps onto the firmware and customize it in ways that Dlink never intended.
It does have a lot of things going for it
1) Ogg/Vorbis support - as an early contributer I'm happy to play my ogg collect - but the metadata support sucks
2) XviD support - again, my codec of choice for video.... except that it has a lot of sync problems and drops a lot of frames/freezes up randomly.
3) Wireless G by default - 802.11b is nmo good for video.
4) Every connector on the backplane you'd ever need.

It's frustrating, since I can dig around I can see how easy it would be to make this thing absolutely rock, but dlink just isn't supporting it. This may be because it's a repackaged Redsonic player....

Anyway... time to get imeem [imeem.com] running on this creature ;-)

Re:Squeeze Box

[spacecowboy420]

Looks awesome - except, what about video? I can imagine video codecs, the site doesn't even mention video.