CEDIA 2013

Two-year old RipWave has come out with the ultimate media streaming machine. Not only can it rip your Blu-rays and DVDs to its hard drive, you can add a cable card or off-air antenna and use its hard drives as a DVR. It can also stream videos from most any video streaming website using the PlayOn server or stream to other devices using the Plex DLNA server.

Models names follow the surf theme. They are offering a dedicated movie player model, the Tsunami for $2000. The media player line can also play music and photos and includes the Stingray with 3 to 12 TB of storage, the Barracuda, and the Orca with 9 TB up to 30 TB of storage. The software menus are as impressive as the hardware features. Users can choose from a number of graphic menus from a carousel to a grid to extensive information about a movie that displays metadata from 7 different sources. The menu options make it one of the truly intuitive devices as each user can choose the view that is easiest for them to use.

The Ripwave is the best media server I've seen yet. Let's see if it performs as well as its first impression.