Media Player Hardware

[quig69]

Has anyone tried the D-Link DSM-320 Medialounge media player? I picked one up this week and despite a few functional short comings, I love it!!! It allows you to access all of your music, photos and movies from your TV.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has tried it. And if so, are there any tips to maximize the performance of the media player? I found one tip to smooth out the video, but am wondering if there is anything else out there.

 

Thanks

[NiteShdw]

I have a DSM-320RD (with the DVD drive). I had it set up in a few minutes, and it streams everything I have. I was very impressed with it... except for one thing: The DVD drive doesn't read DVD+R discs. It CLAIMS to read every type of DVD media, but i found that only DVD-ROMs worked in the drive. Everything else had read errors. I hope a firmware upgrade will fix this.

[USWhoFan]

I had a DSM-320 and wasn't very impressed, especially for the cost. (At the time almost $300 USD)

 

I ran into a lot of video, mainly downloaded, it couldn't play due to codec issues and the biggie for me was I've got 10's of thousands of MP3's and it just couldn't read the directory structure. (//ROOT/Band Name/Album Name/Songs.mp3) I spoke with the D-Link folks and they said I had too much music for the system and I'd need to break it up into smaller groups/shares and then it might work. I didn't find it very acceptable of an answer, especially the 'might' part.

 

The picture stuff worked like a charm, but I wasn't really interested in a slideshow device.

 

But I've heard others say it's great and did everything they wanted it to do, it just didn't suit my needs.

 

The one thing I did notice was that I had a great wireless (G) signal but the video that did play, played choppy, but it was fine once it was hard wired.

 

The only other item like it out there I know of is the Linksys Media Center, but it requires a system with Windows Media Center 2005 to function. But if I had a Media Center PC I'd just connect that to the TV and be done with it, I wouldn't need the streaming device.

[NiteShdw]

Try using Windows Media Connect as an alternative to the built-in software. There is actually another free UPnP media server, but the name escapes me right now.

[Kiznik]

TVersity is a freeware program that you can use instead of the native software. It's supposed to be able to handle a lot of media types.

You can get it here:

www.softpedia.com TVersity MediaServer download page

[USWhoFan]

:( I don't have the unit any more, I returned it before it was too late.

I might give it another shot with a different UPnP Media Server, but I don't think that'll help the codec issues I ran into. :thinking:

[quig69]

My medialounge is not set up on the fastest pc in the world. In fact, it is only a 1.3gig htz Celeron. With only 256mb ram. Any recommendations on processor speed and ram that would improve performance?

[weareborg]

You definately don't want a celeron. Try eithe a P4 processor, preferably one with a high Front side bus, and the RAM needs to go to 512

[sharktank]

I have bought a buffalo linktheater player. It works most of the time but now and again loses its ip address which means a complete reboot. I have found that it works much better with buffalo' airstation hard wired. Have tried linksys router, blew up and died. Belkin worked when not to hot (i mean toast bread hot) but this was not to often. Sent it back and replaced it with Buffalo seems to be working much better now. The player can upscale the output but not DVDs have not been able to try this as tv is only 480i. Picture quality depends on what you feed it. Have found progs like HD Lost are excellent but some progs like Stargate SG1 are not so good but still very watchable. Have tried many DVD players in the past but found the making of files compatible a pain. So linkplayer does what it says on the box which most of the time is Okay. I think next time I will build a media centre pc so that I can configure it the way I want it. The only thing that stopped me last time was price but since then the price of a mc pc has come right down.