With the growing popularity of home networking and media sharing, scores of streaming devices have surfaced in recent years. While most are introduced by traditional computing-based companies such as D-Link and Netgear, growing competition has been brewing from their consumer electronics counterparts. Among these is NeoDigit, a Hong Kong-based new face and its promising Helios X5000 HD media streamer.

Loaded with audiophile-grade components and a highly sought-after 1080p HDMI playback, this streamer is way ahead of the competition in terms of build and capability. Will the X5000 be the ultimate HD streamer for the performance-conscious? Read on for our indepth analysis of this beefy and mean-looking concoction.

Design
The X5000 has a solid look to it, and it should--it's a solid enclosure in black metal with solid lines and absolutely nothing in the way of smoothed edges or fancy-schmancy glowing doodads. That's something of a double-edged design decision, however, as while it looks the part of a high-end A/V equipment, there are also some rather rough edges and a feel that makes it seem a little on the cheap side in terms of build quality. As an example, there's a USB port on the side of the X5000 that allows it to stream compatible media from USB drives, but it's basically just a rough hole that's been cut out of the metal. The other problem with this particular port is that if you choose to put the X5000 in an A/V cabinet along with your other equipment, you probably won't be able to access it, unless you've a gap in your cabinet at the side. There is a secondary USB port, but it's at the back of the X5000 next to the heat sink, where it's both hot and hard to reach.

The front of the X5000 has the same simple display style that some will love and some will loathe, with buttons only for simple playback functions as well as a somewhat clicky power button. Every other function of the X5000 is based around its remote, which is a weird beast on its own. Basic functions are mapped in rather illogical places. There's no size difference in the play/pause/stop buttons, while the DVD menu button is on a rocker along with the display button, and we've no idea why.

The rear of the X5000 houses just about every connection interface you're likely to need, with the exception of DVI. What you do get is HDMI, component-video, S-video and composite connections for video, as well as optical, coaxial and analog audio outputs, all of which are clearly labeled.

Features
The X5000 is a media player with support for DVD playback as well as streamed media over a network or via attached USB drives. It supports up to 1080p HD displays--presuming your screen can deal with that--via HDMI, although naturally you'll have to drop down to SD displays if you're using anything but the HDMI or component-video connections. It's also a network-aware player, via either its 10/100Mbps Ethernet port, or wirelessly using an 802.11b/g antenna that connects to the rear of the player. The X5000 is an UPnP-compatible player, and NeoDigits offers its own take on UPnP server software on its Web site, called NeoLink. The NeoLink application allows you to share music, photos and video to the X5000, as well as open up your bookmarks for TV-based Web surfing.

Neodigits sells the X5000 as a media player for audiophiles particularly, and with that in mind the X5000 is built from some very high-end components, including a Wolfson Audio digital-to-analog converter and a BurrBrown OpAmp, together with gold-plated audio connectors. Combine that with the 1080p-capable output (via HDMI), and you've potentially got a very potent media player, indeed.

Performance
Setting up the X5000 will take a little bit of patience, as by default it comes out-of-the-box configured to deliver video via the composite-video port--hardly the HD video connoisseur's port of choice. You can either set the connection you'd prefer from an onscreen menu if you do connect up by composite in the first place, or use the TV Modes button to skip through all the choices. Skipping is a pretty slow and tedious process, however, and it's hampered by the fact that if you overshoot by pressing the button too many times, you then have to go through every other choice again before you can get back to the one you wanted. Likewise, in the setup annoyances category, we struggled for quite some time to get wireless networking working properly on the X5000, especially as it's tough to get the SSID of your wireless network noticed.

Playback of directly connected (via DVD/USB) media with the X5000 was superb through HDMI/optical connections, and predictably less so with the lower-end connection options. On the network side, things were slightly less impressive. That's partly due to the nature of 802.11g networks; while they're theoretically capable of delivering video without stuttering, the reality is that in some situations they'll struggle. In its favor, the X5000 handled network dropouts a little more elegantly than many other streaming solutions we've tested, as it simply paused the video until it had enough cached data; that's much more pleasant to the eye than getting a stream of corrupted video to watch. We did find that if the player was used for very long periods--such as running it as a music jukebox--it had a tendency to get rather hot and lock up, which is annoying.

The NeoLink software has a clean interface, but it's not without its problems. For some reason, we couldn't get it to run beyond the splash screen on one of our test PCs--a splash screen which declares itself to be Media Sever software, by the way--although plenty of other UPnP solutions such as TVersity ran without problems on the same system. The ability to use your Internet Explorer or Firefox bookmarks to browse on your TV sounds good in theory, but the implementation is frankly awful as scrolling is always done to the next hyperlink, which can see you jumping all around certain Web pages and losing information in the process. That kind of feature-poor implementation continues with the photo and music playback options. Music playback includes a slideshow of images, but there's no way to use your own pictures. Likewise, you can run photo slideshows, but not with accompanying music.

The X5000 can access online video-and audio-streaming services, but even with a nice internal amp, there's not much you can do with heavily compressed video and audio to make them sound good, and putting them up on a 1080p display is only going to highlight how awful they look.

The X5000 is an intriguing mix of really good components and design, and frankly, some awful ones. Some of our issues can be resolved, however, with firmware updates--while we were testing, at least one firmware update was released--and with an asking price of US$579, it does come in cheaper than most media streamer competitors.