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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good potential, but poor design..., August 25, 2005
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.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 Stars for Value (Update -2 stars for mediocre software), January 5, 2007
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..."
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good product and easy setup., May 10, 2006
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.
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