Uebo M200 Bronze review

Uebo’s M200 is larger and chunkier than most streaming media receivers, partly because it has a bay for a 3.5in SATA hard disk to store media on. The hard disk – which you can choose to buy with the streamer – fits on to a metal plate that unscrews from the bottom of the chassis. A small internal fan provides cooling, along with a quiet but high-pitched whine that may irritate some.

On the back, you’ll find an HDMI port, optical and co-axial S/PDIF outputs, component and composite video outputs and a pair of stereo phono ports along with a 10/100 Ethernet port. On the side is a pair of USB ports for connecting external storage or an optional wireless dongle, a memory card reader and a USB B port that allows you to connect the M200 to your PC as an external storage device. The remote control is fairly compact but has some redundant buttons, including a largely pointless number pad.

The M200 has a rather sleek looking ribbon interface, although we found that its resolution defaulted to 480p and we had to manually set it to 1080p to match our TV. Options include a browser that allows you to view media files on the network or the M200’s internal hard disk, internet channels (including YouTube and Flickr), internet radio and controls for the streamer’s integrated BitTorrent client.

There’s also an icon for your media library, which allows you to view content stored on the player’s hard disk. A file copy tool lets you transfer files between the streamer’s drive and other devices on the network. All the file browser interfaces allow you to choose to view all your media files or only music, movies or images, which is handy if you want to browse your music collection without seeing the album art image files in the list.

The M200’s format support is excellent, but it didn’t support menu navigation for our Blu-ray rip. Both video and menu support is present for DVD ISO rips, though, and all our test files worked. Video playlists aren’t supported but the streamer will happily play entire directories in sequence. You have to click next twice to move to the next video or audio track; this means you can’t accidentally skip in the middle of a movie but it’s not very helpful if you want to skip through an album.

We noticed a brief pause before audio tracks started playing. UPnP and Media Library indexed files are displayed in album order but those shared via SMB were listed alphabetically. Photo slideshows work, but you don’t get a thumbnail index and skipping images is slow.

The basic M200 costs $210 US, which is around £135. Although everything’s priced in US dollars, UK orders are actually shipped from Ireland for a reasonable $25 (around £16). It has most of the features you’re likely to want from a media streamer, especially if you want to fit a hard disk. However, some features lack polish, particularly photo browsing. The Western Digital WD TV Live Hub is similarly priced, comes with a hard disk and easier to use.