if hardwired, i think the common routers will work, incl the DLink supplied by Unifi in my case.
if wireless, you will need a wireless receiver/dongle. other than the original from acryan, some others may work, mentioned here:
http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1475667/+1180

price... i saw most places at RM499 still, but likely cheaper at lowyat kl or digitial mall pj.

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Added on January 29, 2012, 12:59 pm
not famiiar with yr tv, but if it is fullhd 1920x1080, you can enjoy nice videos with the mini2.
the tv itself may have a usb port to plug/play in direct, but you will find some files will not play properly, unlike a media player.
do you have an avr? or you will play direct mini2 to tv? one hdmi cable mini2-tv will do, you get both video and auido.

1. yes. assuming the files are normal ones with extensions in the files like avi, mkv, rmvb, mp4, flac, mp3, etc...
some files are zipped, you will need to unzip before playing.
2. yes. thumdrive, portable hdd, ext hdd, all will work. take note small drives are usually formatted fat32, max 4gb only so it won't accept bigger files which are very common these days. to accomodate bigger files, you need to reformat drive to nfts.
3. yes and yes. this feature offer a few things - within a lan, wireless or hardwired, you can transfer, copy, stream, etc. but... it can be slow, depends on yr setup and internet/wireless speeds.
4. mini2 has built in internet options - youtube is one of them. others incl podcasts, news, weather. youtube comes out nice. streamyx will not work well for internet options, need unifi. if you want more options like online stream from internet tv sites, you will need to consider the new model veleo - comes with a keyboard, discussed in this thread very recently.

To know more about the supported file formats, you can go here. It should playback on almost any type of TV so long as it has HDMI or at the very least composite connectivity.

The mini2 does not have internal HDD support so, it relies on external HDD via USB or NAS (Network Attached Storage). For the latter, connectivity is either via the built-in LAN port or by way of optional wifi dongle. If you want internal HDD, go for the Playon!HD2 instead.

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Added on January 29, 2012, 1:18 pm
As long as your network is set up properly, be it wired or wireless, DHCP or fixed IP, the Mini2 will have no problems accessing any NAS.
The price of the Mini2 is listed as RM499 but I recall it was on offer at RM399 (with free 8Gb thumbdrive) a few months back

Yes, the wifi dongle can be used to access the internet via your wifi router. Similarly for file transfers, from any HDD within your LAN to the HDD attached to your ACRyan

for internet options incl youtube, the gui does not require a physical keyboard. for searches, the virtual keyboard will come on for you to "click" on the characters.

file transfer acryan hdd-broadband need a pc as host/control and some setup procedure i posted somewhere in this thread. you can't download/transfer from www to acryan without a pc.

one thing i must say - i find it too slow to transfer/download files between pc and acryan wirelessly. maybe 100% usb3.0 hardware is faster. i gave that up, just get all on pc first, then copy to hdds.