ryan kennedy’s blog

A little over a week ago I purchased the D-Link DSM-320RD Wireless Media Player. I had 2 goals in mind with this device:

1. I wanted to be able to listen to my music tracks from Yahoo! Music Unlimited anywhere in the house, including places I don’t have a PC.
2. I wanted to be able to watch videos stored on my PC on my nice, 55″ television without having to lug a computer into my living room.

The D-Link is able to do both of these things, so I figured it was a match made in heaven. In addition, the 320RD comes with a built-in DVD player, meaning I could get rid of my old DVD player and save a set of inputs on the television.

Pricing and Availability

First, I couldn’t find the D-Link devices at my local Best Buy (those guys continually fail me when it comes to inventory of anything I want). So I set out to the last place I wanted to go…I went to Fry’s. Amazingly, they had it in stock for under $300. They also had the little brother, the DSM-320 (identical except it doesn’t have a DVD player or card reader) for just under $200. I snagged one and brought it home.

Setup

One nice thing about the D-Link is that it has both 802.11g and ethernet. I used the wired ethernet for my setup, but I did try out the wireless. I had an issue with the D-Link detecting my media shares over the network on wireless. I’m guessing there was some bridging funkiness going on with my router that wasn’t passing some multicast packets between the wired and wireless networks. I switched to the wired ethernet and the detection worked much better.

The setup interface is a bit clunky. I had a hard time stumbling through the wireless setup just because setting up a connection to a particular SSID isn’t intuitive, especially when you have SSID broadcast turned off on your access point.

D-Link ships with it’s media sharing software to install on the PC. It’s not great, but it gets the job done. One annoying thing is that it doesn’t monitor the filesystem constantly for new content. You either have to refresh the media database by hand or schedule it to run periodically. Additionally, you can use Windows Media Connect (WMC, Microsoft’s UPnP AV server) to share content. Both the D-Link and WMC will share audio, video and photos…though each is a little different (I’ll get into this more later).

Remote

The remote on this thing flat out sucks. I’m not even talking about the button layout (which is bad, but not terrible), I’m just talking about how well it works. In my experience, if I wasn’t pointing the remote EXACTLY at the IR receiver on the box, it didn’t pick up keypresses. An RF remote would have been a welcome addition.

Also, the remote won’t control the television…just the D-Link. That means you have no choice but to use 2 remotes. This is a little annoying after using a TiVo/Comcast/DirecTV remote that will control both the television and the box. While the D-Link remote does have a volume control, it controls the volume output from the box independently from the television. So you could have the volume at full blast on the box, but if the television volume is turned down you won’t be able to hear it. I always hate how on my PC there’s about 3 different places to control the volume for any given application, so this really irritated me.

Music Playback

Music playback was by far the most important draw of the D-Link. I use the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service and my wife and I like to listen to music while we’re playing games at the table. First, the D-Link will NOT play back DRM’d music out of the box. The D-Link software will make the songs available to the box, but the box cannot play back copy protected music. In order to play back the DRM’d tracks, you have to pull the song through Windows Media Connect.

The D-Link box will only talk to one media share on the network at a time. So if you have both the D-Link software and Windows Media Conect running at the same time, you have to tell the box which to talk to. THIS SUCKS. You have to go into a setup menu, autodetect the shares on the network and then select the right one. You also have to make sure that the PC you’re trying to connect to has authorized the D-Link to use WMC. I’ve seen WMC frequently forget what devices have been authorized, forcing me to reauthorize the device.

When you finally get the WMC connection all set up, it plays music like a champ. You can shuffle, repeat, fast forward, skip, play, pause and more. Sadly, the D-Link has a screen saver but it doesn’t seem to want to switch on as long as any music is being played back. This especially sucks as I have a rear projection television that is prone to burn-in. The screensaver kicks in fine if the box is idling on one of the menu screens, but as long as it’s doing ANYTHING it will not kick over to the screen saver. The music playback screen is very static, so it’s a sure thing that if I listen to music for several hours I’m going to end up with some nasty burn-in.

Video Playback

Video playback makes it possible for me to watch recorded television programs from my PC on my television. I have a TV tuner card in my PC and it acts as a backup to my TiVo for whenever I have a scheduling conflict. So having a device that would allow me to watch the shows on my TV without having to transfer them to a DVD is key.

Sadly, WMC does a shitty job of playing back video. As it turns out, you can’t fast forward anything served up by WMC. That means no commercial skipping. The D-Link software does allow shared video to be fast forwarded. Unfortunately, that means you have to go into the setup menu and switch the D-Link to communicate with their software instead of with WMC. This is lame.

I also noticed that even over a 100 megabit network that there are severe compression artifacts during scenes with any amount of motion (chase scenes, for instance). Watching the network utilization, it’s clear that the network isn’t a bottleneck. I’m not sure if it’s the sharing software or the box itself, but it sucks. This was an MPEG2 stream, it would be interesting to try other video formats and see if the problem persists. But seeing as how MPEG2 is what my TV capture card records in, not doing that format well is a total bummer.

One nice thing about the box is that you can play back video stored on a CF/SD/MMC card. This is handy, but in no way offsets the amount of suck involved in playing something back over the network.

Photo Viewing

Photo viewing is fine, about as good as the photo viewer on the TiVo. I didn’t really play around with this much since audio and video were much more important to me.

Verdict

This box is a certifiable piece of shit. I actually just returned it today. The issues with the software and having to switch between 2 sharing methods (D-Link’s software and WMC) are absolutely stupid. Would it have killed D-Link to make the box able to aggregate multiple media servers? The video playback issues make me want to gouge my eyes out. The screensaver issue when listening to music leaves me afraid to listen to music on my television. The device shows promise, maybe this is still the early adopter phase and I’m just expecting too much too soon. But for $300 I’d expect it to be a hell of a lot better than it was.

At this point I’m thinking a more expensive, custom Windows Media Center PC is the way to go. Since it’s a Microsoft-based PC it won’t have any issues playing back DRM’d music files and I’ve never had an issue playing back video on my PCs in the house, even if it was over the network.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2005 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.