Conclusions and Final Verdict

The Fantasy is an interesting product that does not seem to make a whole lot of sense to me. Yes, it’s a media player that can attach to the television and supports a lot of formats. It is a software pirate’s dream! The lack of a network port or built-in wireless access does seem to limit the device. I would like to be able to stream media across my gigabit network to the television via this device, as many modern users would also like to do. You cannot with the Fantasy. The price of the Fantasy is less than the equivalent Roku unit that supports media playback.

So does that make the Fantasy a bad product? Absolutely not! If you are willing to “sneakernet” your data to the device, the fact that it will play back all of the popular formats without any mess or fuss is fantastic! The built-in support for surround sound and the TOSLINK connector give you some great functionality.

If you understand those caveats going in to it, then you will think the Fantasy is a great device. I would like to see a network connection for streaming media from a DLNA device, and of course a Netflix app would be useful. Perhaps a newer version will bring that functionality?

There is one positive though about the Fantasy that I cannot emphasize enough; it will seek on 1080p HD media without any hiccups.  I think that is spectacular on a device of this size and power, with only a USB 2.0 connection to the media.

The competition for media players is intense, and it is interesting to see how it plays out. For the Fantasy, it is far from being a fantasy device, but a great inexpensive media player if your media exists on an external hard drive. Perhaps with an update or two it will become a highly recommended device, but for now it caters to too much of a niche market to gain the adoption needed to be competition to the Roku and the game consoles.

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