Graphical Interface

The biggest drawback with rebranded devices like the Fantec or A.C.Ryan media players is their firmware. Generally straight from the ODM, the firmware is buggy, sluggish and not very user friendly most of the time. Since the QNAP NMP-1000 is an in-house product from the company, so is the onboard OS and its user interface. It is fast, feels very polished and has a simple and extremely easy to use layout. In other words it is a joy to use. Check out the gallery below.

General User Interface

You may either enter the first menu item, which lists all your media - no matter what the format - or you may select the video, audio or pictures menus individually. Doing so will only display files of the selected type. In the Video submenu you may watch YouTube videos or even Apple Trailers on top of your own digital clips on the local or remote drive. QNAP seems to have set the Apple trailer playback so that it chooses an HD format automatically. This looks great on your TV and should be great for checking out what's in cinemas before actually heading out the door to the movies. In the "Pictures" menu you may also access your local or network storage and even load up images from your Flickr or Picasa accounts. This trend continues with Music, where you can stream Shoutcast radio stations for example.

Settings UI



Navigating through the menus is - as I mentioned before - very easy. Pushing right enters the next sub menu, while pushing the left arrow returns to the upper level in the hierarchy. The NMP-1000 is capable of using specific USB wireless network adapters to connect to your home network without any cables, but QNAP does not include this dongle with the unit. It would have been great to see that functionality included in the unit right from the start, but at least you can upgrade this aspect easily with the use of the USB plug in the back. One of the qualifying parts is the D-Link DWA-140, which I went ahead and bought for just over 30 € on Amazon. Once connected to your home network, you may add remote disks of the computers around your home to the network media player. I added the main drive of my workstation to the NMP-1000 after which it showed up under every tap in the main menu. QNAP has created an on-screen keyboard to allow you to enter any needed information like user names and passwords. You traverse the list of letters with the remote control or with the four way navigation on the NMP-1000 itself.

The built-in BitTorrent client is buried quite deep in the menus but only really serves a single purpose of showing you what is being downloaded and the ability to control the state of each download. The torrents are added from your PC over the network, after which the NMP-1000 takes over and downloads the files straight unto its own hard drive. This means that you may shut off your PC at night, while the network media player keeps on downloading in your living room - using a fraction of the power of your actual computer. So, the PC further expands the functionality of the NMP-1000 and the next page will show you how.

Last, but not least, I tried playing a fullHD 1080P MKV file, which comes with DolbyDigital 5.1 and weighs in at around 20 Mbps. You may download the same file from our archive here. It started within 1-2 seconds and worked flawlessly.