Customer Reviews

D-Link DSM-320RD Wireless Media Player, PS DVD, 5-in-1 Card Reader, 802.11g, 54Mbps

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This could've been a great product, if it actually worked as advertised. First of all, the setup was a nightmare. And it's coming from me, someone with over 10 years of experience in IT. I spent a few hours on the phone with D-Link Support, and they weren't very helpful. I ended up resolving problem(s) myself after hours of online research. I finally got the damn thing to work, but it's behaving very flaky at times. I have to reboot my computer several times before it finally recognizes the server (software); sometimes I loose wireless signal all of a sudden. The hardware part seems to be working fine, it's mostly the software (firmware) that I blame. Like I said before, it's got a lot of nice features, but lacks performance. Hopefully, D-Link will release some updates shortly, otherwise, I suggest you think twice before purchasing this player.

Is it perfect? No. However, for just over $200 it's hard for me to complain about this device since it does exactly what I need it to do and integrates a lot of features. It gets my media files off my PC and plays it on my stereo and TV in my living room. It has an integrated DVD player that works quite well and the software works pretty well.

After my first day of use, here are my comments. I'll write a followup in a few days after playing around with it more.

Setup:
Install the server software on your PC FIRST.

I have a D-Link Wireless G router so that may be part of the reason why it was pretty easy for me to setup, but it was pretty straightforward right out of the box. I put the CD in my PC, ran the setup software. Then plugged in the DSM, followed the directions, it found my system and all my stuff and I was done in about 10 minutes. I am using WPA-PSK encryption and that worked just fine as well.

The on-screen navigation was a little odd at times and the remote is rather busy with a myriad of buttons, but I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get going. Finding music files and such isn't so easy with the limited navigation you can do with a handheld remote and TiVo like TV interface as opposed to a mouse and keyboard. However, that is largely my fault since my media collection is about as well organized as laundry in a duffle bag at the moment. Playlists are key and I'm in the process of getting that all sorted out now. I just wanted to make sure it worked before I went through the trouble of getting organized.

Features:
One of the main reasons why I went with this unit is because it is one of the few Media Players out there that supports WPA-PSK encryption. Because of better security and WEP compatibility issues with other devices on my network, I have to use WPA. I put in my key clicked OK and it connected to my network just fine.

The single disc DVD player actually is really useful for me. I have a 400 disc DVD changer which is great for discs I own, but discs that I borrow or rent and need to take in and out, it's a pain. Now I can just use the DSM to play discs that I have temporarily.

CF and SD card readers are nice, but I'm not sure how often I'll use them since I'll likely dump pictures on my PC server and then get it over the network.

Auto software and firmware updates are nice and when I first power cycled the system it automatically updated itself to the latest firmware.

The server software is a little techy but being an engineer, it was easy for me to deal with. The server software scans the directories on your PC that you want to make accessible to the DSM which reads the scan file when it starts up. Note that if you make changes to your media files, i.e. add new files, change playlists, etc., you have to update the server before you will see the changes on your DSM. A small inconvenience, but I can see that you don't want the DSM using the network all the time checking the files when most of the time things aren't changing.

I can't comment on the progressive scan since I don't have a progressive scan TV (yet).

PROS:
Relatively inexpensive and lots of features
Setup was easy (at least with other D-Link gear)
Nice looking on screen display

CONS:
Does not recognize MOV files
Remote control buttons feel pretty mushy (ok, that's a nitpick)

In summary, I think ease of installation is largely luck of the draw with regards to whatever else is on your network. Sometimes things play well together, sometimes they don't. In my case, they played well together. It's not audiophile/videophile level performance, but if that's what you want, what are you doing buying a $200 gizmo and listening to MP3s anyways? For the price, the performance and value is hard to beat. I'll see how things go over the next few days, but so far so good.

May 5, 2007 Update:
Ok, I'm going to have to take away 2 stars because after using this for some time, the software really keeps this thing from reaching its full potential. Fairly often, when I power it up, it just hangs and I have to restart it. On occasion, several times. Other times, it will just randomly hang in the middle of a song. It doesn't do it very often, but enough that it gets annoying. Also, the audio still does skip every now and then. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to put in a 3-4 second buffer to deal with sporadic network interruptions. Geez, $30 CD players have buffers. Memory is cheap guys.

It pains me to write this since this device really does have some nice features. I like being able to put up slide shows of my family and then go and select from my music collection to play it in the background while it goes through the images.

On a high level, it works and does cool things. It's just some of the finer details of the software robustness and user interface that make me shake my head and say, "Another *almost* great product..."

I was skeptical about buying this product and made sure the return policy would allow me to easily return it if it turned out to be a dud. I have been looking at other products of this type including the DLink DSM-320, DLink DSM-520, Buffalo Technologies LinkTheater PC-P3LWG/DVD.

1) DSM-320: Had many negative reviews and no dvd player.
2) DSM-520: Very new. High Definition player, but no DVD.
3) Buffalo Technologies LinkTheater: Many negative reviews but has HD and a dvd player, also supports wmv and divx.

Initially I had been leaning towards the Buffalo unit. It supports WMV, WMV HD, DivX, DivX HD and had a progressive scan DVD player built in and supported HD output. 2 reasons I did not buy it were 1) the many bad reviews and 2) it was not available to pick up locally and I was worried that if it really did not function properly I would have to go through a lot of hassle to get it returned.

I chose the DSM-320RD mainly because I suspected that my old DVD player (which is really not old, bought it on Black Friday last year) was having trouble playing the discs I burned. I figured I would like a player with an integrated dvd player so I could save some space and have a decent player.

I have a Netgear 802.11g/a wireless router and I actually went ahead and installed the media lounge software that came with the unit onto my Windows XP based PC. When I fired up the unit and followed the configuration steps, I was pleasantly surprised to see I had no issues detecting the network and that it detected the server easily.

One thing that I worried about was wether the unit would support WPA-PSK wireless security as that is what I use on my network. Luckily it did and after using the onscreen keyboard to enter the information it worked fine.

I have it set up to use the component video output (progressive scan) and 16:9 on my HDTV. The picture quality is great. I started off by watching a couple episodes of Supernatural that I had recorded with my TV tuner card on the PC. They played very smoothly except for a few places that caused the video to start stuttering. Since it always seems to do it at the same part, I am not sure if it is a case where the variable bit rate on the videos gets too high and the player is not able to keep up with the decoding or the bandwidth of the wireless connection becomes saturated. The video catches up afterwards though and things move along. I am going to try a wired connection at some point to test wether it is the player or the wireless that causes this.

My one big problem with this player is that the reverse function on streamed videos does not work well at all. You are almost better off starting over from the beginning and fast forwarding (which seems to work ok) to the part you want. Another problem I had was that at one point when I was trying to reverse a video it froze up for a little while at which point I hit "Stop". It then lost connection to the server and was not able to find it again until I restard the PC where the server was running. I am thinking maybe using the Windows Media Connect software that people have mentioned might be a way to avoid this. Also, this only happened once and it has worked fine beyond that.

The DVD player on this thing works great! All those old discs that caused my old player to choke work like a charm on this one. Very happy about that.

This player does not support wmv's which is a disappointment but not a showstopper for me since I am most interested in the DivX support. Overall this player is great and I don't know how I lived without one of these things.

Summary:

Pros:

Wireless Streaming works like a charm.
Very nice full featured remote control.
Easy setup.
Very good dvd player, handles burned discs well.
Progressive Scan output.
Good number of inputs/outputs (composite, S-Video, Component)

Cons:

Seems to choke a little when the bit rate gets high on VBR videos.
No support for WMV.
Really bad at trying to reverse through a streamed video.
Seemed to disconnect from the server at one point and required the PC to be restarted before it found it again.


Beyond that I have not experienced any of the crashing some of the other folks here have mentioned. Perhaps because my player was shipped with a later firmware revision? Overall I would recommend this although I wonder if the Buffalo Technologies LinkTheater would have been a better buy.

After 4 days of intensive testing, sadly I am packing my DSM-320RD and about to return it to the store.

Before I detail my reasons for returning the unit, for all farness I would like to point out that other than the reasons I detail below, the unit performs perfectly as advertised. The quality of picture and sound is excellent and I did not experience any issues with streaming through wireless. The user interface is intuitive and this unit could be a great addition to your system. The DVD player does the work.


Cons
----

1. Most and above all... I found a bug in the firmware. When you play your music files in Shuffle mode, everything works fine. however, once you switch to your photos (while the music plays) in order to show off with your fancy slide show, the unit seem to insist replaying the last song that was playing while you switched.... again and again and again...
After hearing numerous "theories" from tech support level 1-2 I finally got to level 3... wow... actually someone who listens to you... anyway.. the guy at level 3 confirmed it may be a bug in the firmware and promissed to forward the issue to the product manager. Unfortunately I only have 30 days to return the unit... so I can't wait for the upgrade to come out.. if ever.

2. Since I'm very technical (work in IT for 14 years) I found level 1-2 of the technical support a waste of time. I got the feeling as if they are rushing to send you away with homeworks. However you may find it sufficient for your needs.

3. The search doesn't seem to work. I assumed that I can search MP3 files by the MP3 tag info but I always either got "Can't Access This folder" or "No results Found". But when played the music it shows the info.

4. Navigation is hard when you have thousands of songs and you want to find a specific artist. Basically you have to scroll (or page down every 8 names at the time) through the names.

5. Same as #4 applies for video

6. You may want to use Windows Media Connect instead of the application shipped with the unit.

I'm not usually one to leave reviews, but I think this little system has been getting a lot of bad press, some of which could be justified, but mostly as people could be expecting too much from a piece of kit that costs less than a good night out!

Being the other side of the pond, you can base this on the EU (European) model, although I would think the only difference is the Scart socket for AV connections, and a PAL signal as opposed to NTSC for all you 60Hz fans.

The system is well put together, as good as any other DVD type component this side of $500.00. If you want to be really picky, the remote isn't the best in the world, but it does the job as as long as you don't have big sausage fingers or beat the hell out of it.

I am running a basic home wireless network through a Belkin router. Using Windows Media Connect it worked straight out of the box. I had actually set myself up for a nightmare of a installation, but couldn't believe just how easy it was. I'm no IT expert either, believe me if it can go wrong in my house it normally does. This didn't though, took under 5-mins to be browsing through the contents of my desktops' pics, music and vids from the comfort of my sofa.

Music quality and streaming seem just fine. I have a pretty good home set up using a mix of Arcam and NAD through Mission speakers (no i'm not a audiophile, they just had a sale on at the Hi-Fi store) and well, it sounds pretty damn good to me. For those that are searching for pure listening excellence what are you doing buying one of these anyway? Go get yourself a $10000 turntable mounted in rock, have your home acoustically engineered and sit back and enjoy. Personally for me, I'd rather stick this on for a saturday night and enjoy the rest of my time playing cards and drinking vodka rather than worrying about my sofa affecting the resonance of my room.

Likewise, video seems perfectly acceptable too. Okay, it's not going to win any awards, and it won't become the new benchmark for excellence, but it does work, it is watchable and its a whole lot easier than trying to sit your entire family around a 17" monitor. Same can be said for the picture viewing too, it just works... rather well. Couldn't get the thumbnail funtion to work, but I'm sure that's operator error more than anything else.

DVD player is fine, again, it's not the most feature rich in the world, but it's not going to be is it? It does have progressive scan, the picture is bright and clear,with no noticeable digital artifacts and I'll be honest, I can't tell the difference between the D-Link and my rather more expensive NAD one (sorry NAD it is a lovely DVD player, but I can't.. honestly).

I'm sure as technology moves on so will the wireless media arena. It's early days yet chaps, and for not-much-money D-Link have done a pretty good job at making something which is going to make your already busy lives just a little bit easier.

My advice is go and get one. Okay, we all know in 2-years time something bigger and better with even more blue LED lights will be out and we'll all be rushing off with stars in our eyes, and a lump on our Mastercard to get one, but until then this will do just fine and dandy. It works, it works well, an idiot like me can install it, and its a breeze to use. Ask yourselves, for a few hundred bucks what are you expecting?

Oh, why the 4-stars? Well, it would have been 5* if you could drive the unit from the laptop, and not have to use the remote, but hey ho.. its a minor thing, and I'm sure some bright young whiz-kid out there will write a software patch soon.

There ya go, enjoy and hope you find it as useful as I did.

Overall it does what it says it will do. Setup was ok except for the wireless connection. Took forever to detect my network. Once done it connects easily after that.

Cons
1) If you have to return this to DLINK for an exchange for any reason be careful as they jerked me around before crediting back my credit card for the cross shipment. I did not like this at all.

2) To view your photos as a slide show and enjoy your own music, the only way to do it is to create a playlist and then assign the playlist to a memory number like 1. Then when the photos start pressing one plays the music in the playlist. Its crude as I too would like to play music from whatever folder without creating a playlist

3) I hate to see AOL, NAPSTER etc on the main screen. Tech support says they are hard coded in the firmware and cannot be removed. So the only music I stream from the net is live365.com which is quite good

4) Lack of support for wmv.

Anyway its promising and the only reason I got this one it was the only unit with a DVD/CD player and media card reader

I have also experienced many problems with setting up the DSM 320 RD. However, I figured it out. After getting dozens of DIFFERENT answers from DLINK tech support levels one two AND three, I was able to learn the following:

1) Poor or inadequate training of tech support levels 1-3 on both DSM 320 and DSM 320 RD.

2) Lack of coordination between designers, tech support and marketing for these products.

3) Incorrect information on setting up either DSM 320 or DSM 320 RD in downloaded operators manual, FAQ's, quick set up guide AND web site.

4) Bottom line: It took three weeks of my time trying to figure out the many discrepancies between what I observed during set up and what I read or learned from DLINK tech support.

The DSM 320 is NOT the same as the DSM 320 RD. They are not even close in firmware or software. I would NOT recommend the DSM 320 because of reports drop outs in streaming wideband video. I recommend the DSM 320 RD since it has a built in DVD and five in one flash card reader. It works best with the DLINK DI 624 router at 108 g.

I am using the Dlink DI 624 108g wireless router, Windows XP Home and a PC with P4 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gb DDR RAM, 256 Mb VRAM on Radeon 9250 graphics card. Dial up "only" connect to internet.

DSM 320 RD was shipped with faulty firmware ver 1.00 (don't confuse with the DSM 320..using different firmware-now up to v 1.06).

You must first connect DSM 320 RD to router connected to a LAN which is connected to the internet. Disconnect or inactivate ALL firewalls.

I don't have a direct internet connection to the router (DI 624), instead I have a slow dial up using my PC. I took the DSM 320 RD to an ISP who connected it to a LAN using the CAT cable and automatically downloaded firmware 1.2.

Don't install the CDROM software that comes with the DSM 320 RD.

Instead, go to [...] and download free copy of Windows Media Connect. Install software. Hook up DSM 320 RD either by cable (CAT 5 ) or wirelessly to stereo system or TV. Make sure you only use composite for video out and line level (RCA jacks) audio out or you won't be able to set it up properly. The factory default is Comp video output and line level RCA audio output ONLY. Configure the system and change these settings for your needs. I am using S video for Video Out and optical cable for audio OUT.

Select the media to stream on your PC (you don't need to be online or have wideband connection). Add this or drag and drop to "shared" folder of Win Media Connect. No more pain. Thats it.

Turn on system and it works.

CAUTION: The WEP is not yet configured for Windows Media Connect. It must be enabled for privacy. I expect that Microsoft will eventually enable WEP functions for this software. I like 64 bit Hex but this is not possible with the Microsoft software. I got the Dlink software to work under Firmware 1.00 but both firmware and server software are slow and buggy. When you upgrade firmware to 1.02 THE CD ROM DSM 320 RD server software WILL NO LONGER WORK!

I enjoy the DSM 320 RD very much but it was a big waste of valuable time to try to get this device working at first. I have received three separate RMA return authorizations from level 3 tech support but kept trying to get it running and never returned the unit. The DSM 320 RD is working great for me now...but it was a super hassle until I figured it out. Don't believe DLINK tech support level 1 or 2 and most of tech support level 3 answers. First ask them if they have actually USED this same model! The odds are they haven't. Most answers are for the DSM 320 NON-RD model which won't help you.
[...]

I couldn't believe my eyes when I found this player for 149.99. It plays just about any file you throw at it. It accepts media through a card reader, a cd/dvd drive, wireless, and 10/100.

Setting up the player is easy. Connect the cables in the back. Install the software on your PC. Select the media folders to share. Turn the unit on. Set up the wireless connection. Update the firmware.

Everything worked great during the first few hours. The unit streamed audio and video without a hiccup. Navigation was simple.

Now for the problems.

1. The remote sucks. You need to point it directly at the media player. It is slow and unresponsive at times.

2. The fast forward feature sucks. It takes a good 20 minutes to fast forward through a movie.

3. The unit sucks. Why? Because it turns itself off whenever it wants. I was watching an XviD movie on an SD card. Half way through, the unit powered off. I had to cycle the power 2 or 3 times. Add that to problem #2 and you get an unacceptable product.

This unit is everything I've ever wanted in a media player. Unfortunately, the software/firmware kills it. Don't make the same mistake I did. Don't buy this product.

*I'd happily pay $100 more if this thing actually worked.

Ordered the device after buying the DLink DSM-320. That is a great standalone product.

To its credit the DSM-320RD has a sharp picture. However it locked up on certain DVD's and exhibited strange behaviors. The DVD feature set and menus are sparse offering few features compared to consumer DVD players. The response time to the remote overall feels sluggish. The most disconcerting problem I was while playing certain widescreen movies the player wrongly scaled the picture. This happened on "The Fifth Element" which is considered a reference DVD. Popping back and forth from the menus and stop function movies produced different scaling of the picture from widescreen to squashing the entire picture into 4:3 TV mode rendering the movie unviewable.

Its is regrettable that such a good product is hampered by bad implementation of one of its most mature and used functions: DVD playback.

I'd advise keeping your current DVD player and getting the DLink DSM-320 instead. This product is not ready for prime time.

It took me about 30 minutes to get this out of the box, set it up, and start playing music. The biggest obstacle was that I forgot to tell Windows Media Player 11 that this device was friendly and could be trusted. Took me a couple of trys before I actually paid attention to the very clear error message, which was something like (device is not yet authorized).

Great! But now come the gotchas, in order from the biggest to the smallest...

(BTW, I am using Windows Media Player 11, rather than the supplied D-Link Media Server software. Windows "Connect Now" technology is included in 11, so no separate download is required.)

1) I had the variable output level (volume) of the DSM 320-RD set to 8 or 9 (out of 10) and the distortion was HORRIBLE! I was ready to take the thing back, but everyone seems to rave about sound quality, so I figured something wasn't right. When I dialed the unit's output back down to 4 or 5, I could crank the volume up to max on the tuner and it was crisp and clear. Whew! Bad sound was a deal-breaker, so disaster avoided.

2) Network settings. Shortly after getting things working, I kept getting "SERVER NOT FOUND". The network settings it picked were bizarre, and in fact I have no idea how it ever worked. I ended up setting a static IP address, and have had zero problems since.

3) It plays songs on an album in alphabetical order, period. Setting ID3 tags had no effect. I had to put things into a playlist (one per album) to get songs to play in the order. Luckily this is easy to do with WMP 11.

4) NO ALBUM ART! COME ON, PEOPLE! ARG!!!!

5) Photo scaling (and D-Link "tech support"). None of the photo scaling and aspect settings have any observable effect on the display: photos are always stretched and distorted. D-Link tech support told me that I should use WMP 11 to control the display settings of the DSM-320RD...which is a ridiculous statement. I was kind and didn't laugh at them, but it was at this point that I decided I was alone in the wilderness on this problem. I eventually solved this by fiddling with the monitor settings.

6) Maybe applicable to all of the above...the DSM-320RD is a much newer device than the original DSM-320, with different firmware, and it appears that the 320RD is behind on some fixes (current version is 1.04, and the current firmware version of the 320 is 1.09). Still, you'd hope that if they fixed something long ago on the 320, it would be reasonably translatable to the 320RD, and that it should follow soon. Doesn't yet seem to be the case.

Overall, I'm glad I bought it, and based on some of these reviews, I expected it would be 2 weeks or more before I had it working reliably. I'm already there, and now dealing with the smaller items.