Verbatim 98243 MediaShare Wireless

This is a great little device. I bought it to use with my new phone- a Vodafone Smart ultra 6 running Android Lollipop 5.0.2. It hasn't taken me very long to get my head around how to use it and I have found it to be a little more capable than I was led to believe from both Verbatim's website and the reviews I have read before deciding to purchase. If I have any criticisms these are down to the Android app "Mediashare". From what I now know, if my experience is typical of what most people will find albeit with other phones, nobody should be put off buying one.The first thing to do is charge it fully. This took about an hour and a half using my phone's charger. The next thing is to switch it on after first connecting either an SD card or a suitable USB device (hard drive or memory stick (pen drive) and allow it a minute or two to establish its own wireless network then connect your phone to it. At this point you need to open apps. You can set a password to allow connection to the app but this isn't strictly necessary. I opened Mediashare and I soon found that if the phone screen times out, on going back in I get a prompt saying log in to the network. Follow that and it goes to a screen where you are offered the chance to set or input a password. If, instead you click on the top corner widget you get the option of either not using the network or using it AS IS. I chose the latter. Once you have done this you should find that it and all other apps will connect immediately- if not you will get a message saying it couldn't connect to Mediashare. It's a minor niggle that sometimes you have to let the screen time out in order to activate a connection to the app this way. What was really disappointing about the Mediashare app (I am using the January 2015 version) was that having navigated to the directory containing the film files I could choose from, on selecting one it should have offered me a choice of apps to open it with, instead I got a message saying there were no apps installed to open the files with- when I know damn well there are several! However, rather than uninstall the app I have left it on my phone as the options for changing various settings are contained within it and these work well enough- and they're not found on other apps. All was not lost by any means, as I had read other people's reviews which stated that ES File Manager works well with this device. I found this to be true. After installing ES File Manager (free from Google Play) I opened the app and my first task was to find out how to link it to the Mediashare device. There is a widget/ menu at the top left which opens to give you a huge list of options. I chose LAN. It was a case of entering the address 10.10.10.254. It then creates an icon which you click. This gives you a folder icon for either a card or USB device depending on what you have attached. From there you navigate to the file you want. You will find that if the file is compatible with ES File Manager's player (ES Player) it will offer you an option to use that otherwise the options you get depend on which player apps are present on your phone. I tend to have 3 different HD files on my media- MP4, M2TS and TS formats. ES Player loves MP4s. If you select M2Ts or TS files you will need something like VLC Player but even then there can be playback problems but fortunately I have found a way round this. Many of my MP4 files were created using my Hauppauge HD PVR2 and have a variable bitrate of 10MB/s. ES Player played these PERFECTLY when streamed by the Mediashare device. The very same file will stutter when using VLC for Android or something based on VLC so I tried an experiment:There have been quite a number of times when I converted an MP4 file (created by the HDPVR2 using Arcsoft Showbiz) to M2TS or TS format using Video to Video Converter because there appeared to be a timing issue preventing it from streaming to my TV using Nero Mediahome 4 (DLNA server). Doing this gave me a TV- compatible file of visual quality virtually identical to the original MP4. But I was now in a position where ES Player didn't like those files so the obvious thing was to convert them back to MP4. I chose the option to convert to H.264 MP4 on Video to Video. I noticed that when I did the original conversion to M2TS or TS from MP4 the file size and bitrate often decreased, and now I was getting a further bitrate reduction on converting back to MP4. To my delight I found the quality was just as good and best of all these MP4s ran perfectly on both ES Player and VLC!! The issue, therefore was that VLC is more sensitive to bitrate than ES Player and when cut enough, both work as well as the other. I have yet to try cutting an M2TS or TS bitrate as such and seeing if these will stream or not.Another thing worthy of note is that I have found that when using SDXC cards, although Verbatim's website says that the maximum capacity is 64GB, the 128MB Qumox SDXC cards work well, and also whereas Verbatim say that these should be formatted with ExFAT, they actually work just as well for me formatted with NTFS!!One other thing I found is that there is a Chromecast plugin available for ES Player. I installed it but found I couldn't cast from the Mediashare with it. Presumably this was because the Mediashare is on its own network and the Chromecast is on my own local router network. I did read somewhere that someone had succeeded in connecting them but have yet to explore this.In conclusion, hopefully my experiences as detailed here will help you enjoy the use of what is an excellent device.UPDATE 12/10/15: To my surprise the Mediashare app has suddenly started allowing me to select players from a list, as it should do. It's a mystery as to why it didn't do it in the first place, after all I haven't updated the app or even just reinstalled it. What I did note once it started working more correctly is that it will change the icon it displays if it knows which apps it can offer access to, but not if it doesn't know what apps the file type corresponds to. Thus, MP4's have one type of icon, but M2TS etc. have another. If you click on the latter it still says no app installed. However, this still doesn't explain why it is now telling me that it can offer options to play MP4s whereas previously it didn't, and MP4s were there from the start! Weird...The other thing I'm finding now is that as soon as I connect my phone to the Mediashare I'm not having to log in to its network in the manner I previously described, the Mediashare app seems much happier about it. ES file manager needs to log in but only needs a user name - admin and not a password, when going in via a saved network icon. Seems a lot easier now.UPDATE 24/10/15 Having played around in various ways I have made a few further discoveries which could help others get the best out of this device using their Android phone. Firstly, there is an easier way to get VLC media player to stop stuttering- on VLC for Android, go to Preferences, then Advanced and set Network caching Value to at least 600. I have it at 1400. I also have Hardware acceleration disabled. You should find your movies will now play smoothly- and not only will .mp4 stream but so should .ts and .m2ts movies- they certainly have done for me. The other thing I have found is that, if instead you use XBMC media player for Android (now called Kodi)- I installed the latest version (dated 20/10/15), this will play (stream) .mp4, .ts and .m2ts files AND also .iso dvd disc image files from the mediashare!! As previously, just connect the mediashare to your phone wirelessly and if necessary log in to the network as I have previously described.Trust me- it's been brilliant in my experience lately. XBMC played my usual file types without any stutter right from the beginning, no quibbles or questions asked. It didn't like Windows Media Videos though, so there is still a place for other players.There is one slight complication with XBMC- which is that it's not available via Google Play, but there are full instructions on what to do to install it given on pcadvisor.co.uk- easily found if you google for them. All that is otherwise necessary is that you are able to change the security setting which allows you to download from sources other than Google Play. I have done all this and it works a treat for me.

As has been stated by many reviewers, this is a very useful, fairly unique, product. It is slightly smaller than an external 2.5" HDD drive. It worked out of the box for basic functions. As has been previously stated, the apps look very old, but are in the same style as software found on routers and other devices - so not really the "fault" of verbatim, but the requirements of the hardware. People are used to pretty GUI style views and the device and app software is a rather primitive GUI looking back to the early Windows 2 and GEM interfaces of the 80's. That takes be back . . .Next issue was, like others, the inability of some drives to be recognised. It was mentioned briefly in one review, so I was able to work it out very quickly - external USB and HDD's have to be formatted to FAT32 or exFAT, the unit does NOT recognised anything formatted to MAC formats. Disappointing, as most of my HDD's are formatted to OS format. I am having to move 1.1 Gb of movies and files to other HDD's in order to reformat my main 2Tb portable HDD to exFAT so I can stream movies and photos . . a bit of a pain, but it will keep me occupied for a few hours and give me a chance to get rid of a lot of duplicates and other dross.I did not charge the unit out of the box - I was impatient! :) The unit worked for about an hour before the red light for low battery warning turned on. I unplugged my WD HDD and substituted my SDD external HDD. The battery light immediately turned green as the SDD takes little power - so, if you need a long time running on battery, then an external SDD drive will maximise the time you have cordless. Expensive solution, but I had a spare SDD after an upgrade and bought an Zheino external HDD box from Amazon. That's a separate story - but suffice to say, it's great, USB 3 and takes any 2.5" spare HDD you may have. Screwless install, flips open like a pack of cigarettes ( remember those? :) ) and the drive simply slots in. Buy one.I had the usual few issues streaming a movie for the first time. I have iPad's in the house, a small iPad and the new iPad Pro. Both connected and played the movie without issue. The iPad mini found the movie straight away and played with VLC with no issues. The iPad Pro wasn't as painless, but it did find and play with VLC after I sorted out what seems to be a conflict with another media player I had. I had loaded NPlayer which seemed to have caused some confusion with PlayerXtreme but once Nplayer was deleted, all was fine and PlayerXtreme or VLC work flawlessly from within the MediaServer app. I am still having issues getting VLC to recognise the fileserver from within VLC itself. More work needs to be done. Settings in PlayerXtreme work fine.Overall, for media sharing, success. I have yet to try saving photos from my camera to it, but that will be for another rainy afternoon this week.