3. In Use

Upon receiving the MG-350HD, I immediately plugged it into my HDTV and hit the power button. Recessed behind the directional control, a pleasant blue LED began to blink at me... but nothing else happened. I got up and walked back over to check the connections when finally the LED stopped blinking and the MG-350HD powered up. The "boot up" took about 45 seconds, which seemed rather a long wait for a solid state device.

As I sat back down with the remote poised for action I was presented with another problem. Instead of the expected splash screen with the Mediagate logo, I was greeted with a jumbled mess. It turned out that the MG-350HD shipped from the factory in PAL rather than NTSC. (PAL is a TV format used in Europe and is not compatible with my NTSC TV.) Fortunately with a lot of squinting and trial and error, was able to navigate to the setup menu and switch the MG-350HD to NTSC.

In retrospect, I rarely find a people in the US, even among those familiar with technology, that actually know what PAL and NTSC are. Such people would be completely lost before they even started in this case. I looked it up in the manual and it wasn't much help, simply stating, "Select the proper one for using in your country"

I like to see how far I can get in the setup process without needing to consult the manual to see how intuitive the interface is. I navigated to the setup menu and set the video resolution to 1080i, and the audio output to activate the optical S/PDIF output. There was an option to shut off the front LED, which I was very happy to see. Nobody wants a bright LED shining in their eyes while watching movies. Unfortunately the LED option only turned the main blue LED off.

There are three smaller LEDs indicating power, network traffic, and HDD activity. The network and HDD LEDs blink incessantly when they are active and can be quite distracting. Setting up the wired network was cake, I plugged the MG-350HD into my switch and it auto-detected the network and displayed the shared folders on my network automatically.

Wireless Troubles

Setting up the wireless was another issue altogether. There are three areas in the setup menu that needed to be set before connecting to a wireless network. First, under "Network" you must turn the wireless on. Then in a different section called "Wireless 2" security can be enabled and a WEP key can be entered. Then, in a third section labeled "Wireless 1" you can perform an AP scan to search for your wireless SSID. Once the scan has located the appropriate SSID you can chose to use DCHP to allow your router to assign the MG-350HD an IP address or you can turn DCHP off if you prefer to assign a static IP. (Clearly a light knowledge of networking terms and uses would be helpful in setting up a wireless connection.)

The main snag in the setup process was entering the WEP key. The only input device capable of entering information onto the MG-350HD is the remote and while it had a complete set of numbers, I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to set the letters in the WEP. After some trial and error, I discovered that letters are entered by scrolling using the up and down directional arrows on the remote.

I set everything up correctly and went to browse the network wirelessly and found that I was not receiving a signal. I returned and checked all of my settings, but was unable to discover any mistakes on my part. Finally, after three days of trial and error, setting the system up with different configurations, and rendering myself completely baffled, I contacted Mediagate support. They offered up a few suggestions without success and then decided to replace the unit. But before returning it, I decided to restore my router to factory defaults and re-seat the antenna wire inside the MG-350HD. That did the trick! I finally had a connection.

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