Cirgon Encore Multimedia Server Review

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A mom-friendly digital entertainment system

Ripping CDs and DVDs is second nature to a Maximum PC reader. Your entire audio and video library is stored on a server, so you can access it from any of the several PCs in your home. You’ve assembled every photo you’ve ever shot into dazzling digital slide shows with musical soundtracks. When you tire of your own music collection, you have presets for all the best Internet radio stations on your home-theater PC.

Now your less tech-savvy friends and relatives are bugging you to help them set up the same type of entertainment system at their pad. Hmm. Should you a) spend a dozen hours holding their hand while you distill years of experience into private lessons, b) politely tell them to pound sand, or c) recommend they buy Cirgon’s Encore Multimedia Server?

Cirgon's Encore Multimedia Server boots and is ready to play in just 33 seconds.

We suggest you go with the Encore, even if it does fall short of wowing us (there’s a DVD burner where the Blu-ray-read/DVD-write combo drive should be, for starters). The Encore is definitely not designed for power users: It features a single-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230, Nvidia’s Ion chipset, and 1GB of DDR2/800 RAM on a Zotac Mini-ITX motherboard. But we like it because its software is as innovative as its hardware is mundane.

The Encore doesn’t run Windows, nor does it run any retail application software. Cirgon tapped Red Hat’s Fedora Linux operating system instead, and developed a custom user interface and a suite of apps that render complex media-oriented tasks extraordinarily simple.

Imagine teaching your mom how to defeat a DVD’s DRM so she can rip it to her computer’s hard drive as an ISO image, preserving its menus, optional soundtracks, subtitles, and all the extras. Don’t forget to tell her about the software needed to mount the image when she wants to watch the movie. The Encore renders all that as simple as dropping the DVD in the tray and pushing a button to rip an ISO. It can rip CDs and encode them to your choice of MP3, FLAC, or WAV just as easily"”downloading the correct tags and album art in the process. But with an Internet filled with awesome radio stations, Encore curiously limits you to LastFM. You also can’t access Netflix, Hulu, or even YouTube.

Plug your digital camera into one of the Encore’s USB ports (the machine lacks a memory card reader), press a button on the remote, and it will automatically copy the images to its hard drive and ask if you’d like to make a backup copy on DVD. You can perform rudimentary photo-editing tasks, but you’ll want to use a full-featured program on a PC for anything serious. The slide-show production software, on the other hand, is genius. Adding music to a show is a piece of cake, and you can add narration using an optional USB microphone. On playback, the music automatically fades to the background when your narration begins.

The user interface is not visually sophisticated, relying primarily on text instead of icons, but we had no trouble reading the menus from our couch. Unfortunately, the system responds sluggishly to the infrared remote control; and since there’s no physical keyboard, you’re forced to rely on an onscreen facsimile to perform searches. You can plug in a hardwired keyboard, but Cirgon doesn’t provide drivers for any wireless models.

Fill up the 1TB drive and you can add external storage using one of the Encore’s USB ports, or you can connect it to a server or NAS box via the gigabit Ethernet port. There’s an HDMI port, and analog, optical, and coaxial S/PDIF audio jacks to connect the box to your HDTV or A/V receiver.

As a power user, it’s easy to dismiss the Encore as a simplistic walled garden. Despite the use of an open-source operating system, users will be entirely dependent on Cirgon when it comes to improving and expanding the product’s capabilities. Unlike some other products based on open-source software"”Logitech’s Squeezebox, for example"”the Encore has not spawned an organic third-party development community; in fact, Cirgon doesn’t even sponsor a user forum.

On the other hand, a media appliance like the Encore could be just the ticket for those folks who covet your digital entertainment system but don’t have the geek skills to build or maintain one like it.