Samsung Optical Smart Hub review

Once it’s set up, you’ll need an Android or iOS device, or a Samsung TV to make real use of the Smart Hub’s streaming features. There’s a Hub app in the various app stores, which is what you’ll need to use to access the drive. There are upsides and downsides here: the connection is quick and simple thanks to the dedicated app, but the app itself is kind of clunky and crash-prone. The app splits apart activities — streaming a DVD is a different section than streaming a file from a USB drive — but it goes too far, making it needlessly confusing to switch from streaming a video to playing a song, and it letting you see a file in one view but only open it in another. It was also really laggy as I scrolled through menus, and would occasionally animate as if I'd pressed a button, but wouldn't actually do anything. In fairness, I was using version 0.01.28 of the app, so there’s a long way to go before even Samsung considers this app a stable release.

That said, the streaming itself works without a hitch. Streaming files from a USB drive was as easy as inserting it into the back of the Hub and selecting "USB" from within the app's file manager. Files streamed with almost no lag, starting a video about three seconds after I selected it. I was also really impressed with the DVD performance, though that’s largely due to the sheer novelty of it: stick a DVD into the drive, select "DVD Player" in the app, and presto, the movie starts streaming from a physical disc to your handset over the air. You can skip chapters, enable or disable subtitles, switch between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, and access virtually everything else you’d get with a DVD player. Pausing or moving around happens really quickly, and though I don’t love the app’s interface for this function either, it does the job fine.

DVD streaming is a neat trick, but it almost immediately becomes clear that it doesn’t make much sense. Having your whole DVD or CD collection accessible remotely is great, but with the Smart Hub you’re still going to need to go to the drive and change the movie out every time you want to watch a new one, and that kind of defeats the purpose of streaming. I still think you’re better off taking the time to rip your DVDs, and put them on an external hard drive, where they’re all accessible from anywhere.

The Hub is clearly intended to be used when you’re nearby, connecting your device directly to the Hub via an ad-hoc connection. That normally takes over your Wi-Fi connection, so you can’t connect to another network for internet while you’re connected to the Smart Hub, but Samsung smartly enabled Wi-Fi passthrough if the Hub is connected to your router via an Ethernet cable. I didn’t notice much difference in the Hub’s streaming or backup performance whether it was wired or not, but it was nice to be able to access the internet through the device, and it seems to work reasonably well as a router or repeater.

Connecting the Hub to your router via Ethernet also makes its files and discs accessible from anywhere, over the internet. There’s no pretty interface here, though, just an FTP server with your files that you can access and stream as long as you have the address. It’s an ugly system, and a complicated one — you’ll need the manual to help you through the multi-step process of getting the FTP network activated. There’s lots of potential here — being able to stream from anywhere would be pretty great — but for now it feels like a hacky solution, because it is one.

The Hub’s other function, which it does perhaps even better than it streams, is to send content in the opposite direction — from your mobile devices to the Smart Hub. The Hub has to be plugged into AC power to burn discs, but then you can send files from your phone or tablet straight to the Smart Hub, and have them backed up on an external hard drive. If you’re a mashochist who loves outdated technology, you can also burn them straight to a CD or DVD, eliminating the horrible middleman that is your computer. (In fairness, there are surely good uses for this, many of them involving the technophobes in your life.) Unfortunately, you can’t do any of this from an iOS device — it’s Android and Samsung only. The process works well, and surprisingly quickly, sending files faster than a typical Wi-Fi connection because the two devices connect directly, and it smartly sends files to a USB drive first before burning them, in case your Wi-Fi connection is spotty.

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