Philips HMP2000 review

If you’ve been hankering to get Netflix on your TV, Philips has a cheap way to do so with its HMP2000 media player. This tiny wedge is the height of simplicity, with just a single HDMI port on the rear. There’s no Ethernet socket at all and connection to the internet is entirely through the built-in 802.11n wireless networking.

The rear of the box is simplicity itself.

Power the box on and the simplicity continues, with just five icons taking up the home page: Netflix, YouTube, USB, Internet Services and Setup. It’s really Netflix that this box is designed for, so there’s a dedicated button to launch the streaming service on the remote control.

There’s no getting confused with the MP2000’s incredibly simple interface

The Netflix interface is simple and attractive. Thumbnails arranged into rows let you quickly select programmes and films to watch by category, such as TV Programmes, Recent Releases and Action & Adventure. Each time you select something to view, a right-hand panel shows you an overview of the content and user-rating for it.

The Netflix interface is simple and clear and gives you a quick overview of the latest content sorted by category

Click OK and the next screen gives you a bit more information. For films, you can just click the play button, but TV programmes are a bit smarter. Netflix starts by presenting the first episode of the first available series for you to watch, but you can choose a specific episode instead. Once you’ve finished one episode, the next one is queued up for you to watch. For both films and TV, you can resume watching from where you finished off.

TV shows are handled in a smart way, letting you easily watch a series in episode order

Picture quality depends on the speed of your internet connection – as Netflix uses a clever algorithm that adjusts image quality on the fly – and on the quality of the encoded file. Typically speaking films have the best quality, while some TV programmes are in standard definition.

On our BT Infinity connection, 1080p movies looked fantastic and the HMP2000 had no problems dishing out high quality video. Streaming at maximum speed there’s little to tell between this kind of video and a decent HD broadcast. It helps that the box supports 12-bit HDMI Deep Color, as well as 1080p 24p outputs.

Sound is transmitted in surround-sound, although the quality slightly lags behind Blu-ray audio with loseless compression, but you still get that full cinematic feel. The HMP2000 takes care of the decoding, sending the audio to your receiver as PCM.

The tiny remote isn’t very responsive and its buttons are a bit spongy

That’s the good news, but the HMP2000 can be frustrating to use. We found the tiny remote, which looks more like the type of model you’d get with a video camera, a little uncomfortable to hold and use. A larger model with regular buttons would have been preferable.

Then there’s the interface lag. Press a button and the HMP2000 waits for a bit before responding, if it does at all. It can lead to frustrated button pressing, ending up with a rapid burst of action, as the streamer catches up.

In particular, this lag is annoying when you’re trying to use search in Netflix, as navigating through the on-screen keyboard is fraught with possible errors.

The interface lag can make it difficult to do simple things, such as searching for content

Then there’s the slightly inconsistent interface. Using the HMP2000’s main menus, the back button does exactly what you’d expect; in Netflix it asks you if you want to quit the application. Instead, you have to use the cursor keys to navigate back.

A media streamer shouldn’t just be about one service and the HMP2000 also has YouTube built in. We’re rather taken with the interface, which presents the most popular videos as a strip of thumbnails. You can also browse by category and search for content. It still suffers from the same old laggy interface, though. That’s it in terms of internet video services and the only other item of interest that you’ll find is a Picasa app. It’s a real shame that there’s no catch-up TV service, such as BBC iPlayer.

Most people will have a collection of content stored on their network, so it’s a little surprising and disappointing to find that the HMP2000 will not work with UPnP servers or even view the content of network shares. Instead, you can only play other content through a storage device connected to the player’s USB port.

Only FAT32-formatted disks are supported and NTFS-formatted storage will not work. Once you insert a storage device, it’s automatically scanned and its files catalogued, so you can click the relevant icon and view just supported files. At least, that’s in theory, as the HMP2000 decided that some of our PostScript (.ps) files were videos.

Alternatively, you can just browse your storage by folder and pick the files that you want to play. Format is really varied. On one hand, it will play .mkv files and even a Blu-ray ISO, but DivX and Xvid files aren’t supported. As the player will only decode Dolby Digital soundtracks, you need to be careful of those that contain DTS soundtracks.

Ultimately, the HMP2000 isn’t really a media streamer, but a small and relatively cheap box for playing Netflix. Despite the laggy interface it does that job well, producing high-quality video and sound from a small and quiet box. If you just want something to use your Netflix subscription on, this is a decent choice, but if you want a device that can play pretty much any format over your network, and can stream iPlayer and Netflix the Western Digital WD TV Live is only around £25 more expensive. It’s the better choice by far.