Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender WMCE54AG

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Product Details

Product Manual [677kb PDF]

• Item Weight: 9.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 9 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002ZUZVW
• Item model number: WMCE54AG
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 4, 2006

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender lets you bring the digital entertainment available through and stored on your Windows Media Center PC to your Home Entertainment Center, without running cables through the house. Using a Wireless-A, Wireless-G, or wired Ethernet connection, the Media Center Extender displays home-made or downloaded digital movies and your digital photographs on the TV for the whole family to enjoy. And your digital music collection is finally freed from those little computer speakers and can play in full glory through your stereo system. You can also watch and pause live TV shows, or record them digitally for later viewing. Finding something to watch is easy with the free on-screen program guide.

The Media Center Extender sits by your home stereo and television and connects to them using standard consumer electronics cables. Then it connects to your home network by Wireless-A or Wireless-G networking, or if you prefer, it can be connected via standard 10/100 Ethernet cabling. Using the included remote control and the userfriendly menus on your TV, you can quickly find the digital movies, TV shows, pictures or music on your Windows Media Center PC. You can even chat with friends through Microsoft Windows Messenger while watching movies on the same screen.

Let the Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender bring your digital media out into the living room for the whole family to enjoy.

Features

• Connects your Home Entertainment Center to a Windows Media Center PC through a Wireless-A, Wireless-G, or wired network
• Watch home or downloaded digital movies and browse your digital pictures on your television. Also watch, pause, and record live TV shows
• Listen to your digital music collection and Internet radio through your stereo system
• Select entertainment from on-screen menus with the easy to-use remote control

See a comparison diagram of the different wireless technologies.

Wireless networks are rapidly becoming more popular and coming down in price. Since they don't require cables, you can use the devices anywhere in an office or home, even out on the patio. There's no need to roll out an Ethernet network cable to each room of a house; you can network anywhere -- without wires. Outside of the home, wireless networking is available in hotspots at coffee shops, businesses, airports -- great when you're on the road and need to get some work done. For convenience, wireless networking is the answer. What Wireless Standard is Right for Me? Now that you've decided to create a wireless network, the next step is to figure out which wireless standard to use. Basically, a standard is a set of specifications for a device. All devices that follow a specific standard share operating characteristics, such as the radio frequency used and maximum data transfer speed. For wireless networking, there are three standards to choose from at this time: 802.11b 802.11a 802.11g 802.11a/g To learn about the differences between the standards and select the right one for your network, click here for an easy-to-understand chart.

Product Description

Bring your Windows Media Center PC's digital movies, live and recorded TV, pictures and music out into the living room! The Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender lets you bring the digital entertainment available through and stored on your Windows Media Center PC to your Home Entertainment Center, without running cables through the house. Using a Wireless-A, Wireless-G, or wired Ethernet connection, the Media Center Extender displays home-made or downloaded digital movies and your digital photographs on the TV for the whole family to enjoy. And your digital music collection is finally freed from those little computer speakers and can play in full glory through your stereo system. You can also watch and pause live TV shows, or record them digitally for later viewing. Finding something to watch is easy with the free on-screen program guide.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 115 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good execution on great vision, December 23, 2004

By	Stew - See all my reviews

I really like this product. I really like Media Center 2005. But more than anything else, I LOVE the IDEA of this product -- a networked device that helps unite the living room to the home office, giving you one place to put your pictures, videos, and music. This is a great generation one product. I can't wait to see what the next couple of generations bring.

That said, here are the things to be aware of when purchasing:

1) You need to know (or find someone to help you who knows) the basic fundamentals of home networking and Windows. This is not a completely plug and play installation.

2) You must have a very strong network connection between your Media Center 2005 device and your Media Center Extender. Ideally, you would have a wired connection (i.e., using old fashion cables). But I use the Wireless-G option and it works great now -- but I had to spend a good deal of time tuning the placement of my wireless router to ensure optimal connectivity between PC and Extender.

3) Be aware: TV content labeled as Copy Protected will not play on the Media Center Extender. For me, this means one very bad thing -- I can't watch 99% of the shows on HBO on the Extender. This is very disappointing for our family, because we enjoy HBO and actually use the Extender on our main TV in the house (with the Media Center 2005 PC in our home office). Pay TV channels are the only area we have had problems with this, though, so if you don't need to watch these channels on the TV where you are putting the extender, don't worry about it.

4) There are a few other things you can do on the Media Center PC that you can't do on the extender. Mainly for me--the extender can't play content on your Media Center PC DVD drive (I get around this by first burning the DVD to my hard-drive using a product called Pocket DVD -- a perfect solution to put my son's frequently watched kid movies in a place that's easily accessible).

Overall, if you already have Media Center 2005 -- buy this product--it's really cool to have a central hub for all this content with multiple TVs hanging off it.

If you don't already have Media Center 2005, and are considering it -- I recommend it. But be forewarned that it's still what I would call an "early adopter" solution. Be prepared for a few stumbles and bumps -- but it's sure to wow your techie buddies.

84 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed !!!, March 27, 2005

By	Wannabe Geek "Wannabe Geek" (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews

If you are buying this thing to stream video from your PC to another location, please read this!!!!!

First, the Media Center Extender does not support many common movie or video formats such as .Avi, DivX, Xvid or .Vob. The only supported formats are MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or WMV (standard definition only, not high def). In addition, it will not work if these videos have AC3 or Dolby Digital Audio, only 2 channel audio works. See details from the Microsoft Website below:

Video file formats supported:

* Windows Media Video 9 main profile
* WMA Standard audio
* Max resolution 720x480
* Max bit-rate 4Mbps
* WMV content may be Windows Media DRM-protected

* MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standard definition
* MPEG-1 layers I and II audio

So, if you have a big video library on your hard drive, you may not be able to watch them with your Media Center Extender without first transcoding them to a supported format.

Second, you cannot put a DVD in your PC and play it on your Media Center Extender. You would need to rip it to your hard drive (in one of the few supported formats above) before you can play it.

If you want to watch video in another room, I suggest you go out and buy a cheap (about $50-$70) DVD player that will support most of the common video formats.

Okay, now for what the Media Center Extender did well.

Photos- were easy to navigate and had several settings for displaying your pictures.

Music- streamed my play list with good quality sound.

The Live and Recorded TV options worked well but HDTV is not supported.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Idea - Still Some Features Missing, February 23, 2005

By	D. Swager "dwswager" (Alabama,United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First, if your going to buy a Media Center Extender, you do need to have a Media Center PC running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 to extend! This obviously eludes some of us.

Please review Microsofts website MCE area for info on MCE PCs and detailed specs for the extender.

Observations:

1. 480i output via Composite, S-Video or Component jacks. No Enhanced TV 480p nor HDTV 1080i or 720p at this time. Not sure that a software only update could fix this.

2. Recommend Wired connection for both the MCE PC and Extender connected via a switch not a hub. You can do a/g wireless, but video over wireless is tough trick and will need to be tuned for good signal strengths.

3. Audio - Great playback via the extender. Provides ability to play recorded music in a number of formats.

3. Video - Over a wired connection it is great. You can watch TV via the TV tuner or recorded shows saved to the MCE PC hard drive. You can also play videos and view slideshows of pictures. Playback of pictures is limited at this time. Most likely you be reduced to using JPG and other lesser formats. Not support for RAW camera files or Adobe's Digital Negative Format (DNG) yet. Unfortunately there is limited choices for video as well. You'll really need to have your video files in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or Windows Media Format.

3. While it doesn't make sence to extend the "Play DVD" function since the DVD drive is somewhere else, they could have included a local DVD drive in the unit and this precludes playing DVD content ripped to your hard drive.

All in All this is a great idea and executed pretty well. The whole concept of the MCE PC is still young and functionality is being defined and the Extenders are limited by that changing functionality. One concern is that the extender won't/can't be upgraded to work with MCE 2006 when it is released.