With media streamers continuing to assault the home A/V market, it's a little frustrating that we're still waiting for at least one definitive solution that ticks all the boxes. Freecom isn't the first company that would spring to mind when looking for a solution to this problem, but its Network Mediaplayer offers something that, at least on paper, may come very close. You can pick up the device with or without a pre-installed hard drive that allows it to act as a media hub for your files.

Whichever option you choose you'll find an impressive array of connectivity here that includes a DVI port, optical and composite audio, and S-video, composite or component video, the latter of which allows playback of resolutions up to 720p.

You can connect the Mediaplayer to a wired or wireless home network to access shared content on your PC through a television or audio setup, which makes it equally versatile even if you don't buy or use an internal drive. Once correctly added to a LAN you have the option of viewing content stored on the hard drive, wired or wireless network or attached USB storage. We found media file support here to be very good on the whole: a wide range of MPEG formats with variable encoding standards played back first time, and you'll find MP3, WMA and OGG support for audio and JPEG for photos.

The area that most impressed us about Freecom's effort is the most important one - streaming performance. We found it to be highly capable here, particularly in the case of wired operation, but even a wireless connection, the bugbear of many similar products in the past, it performs admirably.

After a short delay while the device initially buffers content, you'll find you can pause, restart, fast-forward or rewind through video with no irritating pauses or loss of connection. Those wanting to stream HD content will find themselves resorting to a more stable wired network option, but using HomePlug's excellent dLan 200AV adapters to avoid trailing wires about the place we didn't have too many problems.

Despite all of these advantages the Mediaplayer isn't perfect. Although the fanless design allows for silent operation we did find the hard drive took a while to start up, and you'll need to wait another minute or so for network access to pop up. The remote control is particularly unresponsive; we'd advise binning the one supplied after teaching the IR codes to an all-in-one remote if you have one.

Finally, you'll find larger collections of video files or photos can be tricky to manage unless you have an efficient folder structure set up on your PC. There are no options here to configure or tweak the interface and very little control over audio or video, such as aspect ratio adjustment or a graphic equalizer for music.

All of these points are relatively minor, and while Freecom hasn't quite nailed the market with its Network Mediaplayer it has produced a product that performs admirably in comparison to most rivals. An added bonus is that the drive-free unit is available for £90, which makes up for a lack of extras such as the access to online content found with the impressive enough NetGear EVA8000.

Freecom gets the most important things right with its Network Mediaplayer and manages to offer a well-priced solution to boot. Although some rivals offer a greater range of features, few perform quite this well, certainly in terms of streaming stability, and for this Freecom has to be commended.