Dlink Wireless Media Player

[collegeboyslive]

DLINK WIRELESS MEDIA PLAYER

Has anyone purchased one of these yet? if so how do you like it, and how well does it play movies?

I am looking at useing this or a simalar product x 6 for a whole house dvd server system.

at $179 its as cheap as buying a good graphics card for a computer.

I am figuring a seperate wired network for them between the server computer , a 100mb switch and 6 of these feeding into an autopatch should enable 6 people to watch movies at once.

commants? suggestions anyoine?

[smee]

I don't remember anything about the D-Link specifically, though I have read about them. A good place to look for this stuff is www.avsforum.com, specifically the Digital Video and Audio Devices forum:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forum...php?forumid=39
There are quite a few similar devices these days.

Most of them require a server program running on a PC somewhere. You may want to look into how many devices are supported by the server. Some of them only allow one.

A number of these devices have come and gone. They last for so short a time that you wonder what kind of support/updates will be available.

I use a couple Hauppauge MediaMVPs for this kind of thing (they are wired, but a lot cheaper (< $100)).

The IOData AVeLink looks interesting. It's just been released in the US. There's a lot of discussion on avsforum (in the DVD section):
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...hreadid=459759
(1028 replies to the original post when I posted this).

[collegeboyslive]

Finally worked my way though d-links abysmal tech support to someone who could a) Speak english as a main language and b) knew what I was talking about.

they said the d-link only supports a single instance. So only 1 per soerver.

which is a shame cause it looked nice.

what i want is for upto 6 of these extender boxes all pulling off 1 pc AND the ability to SHARE the file they are using, in other words if i have a dvd movie on the hard drive say startreck. and someone is watching it in one room, then in another room I want to start watching the same movie, I want to be able to do this. so I would basically have the same movie playing at 2 differnt points in the movie on 2 serperate tvs in the house.

possible ??

[smee]

I know the MediaMVP supports more than one. I've tried it with 2 and it worked ok. I'm not sure how many feeds it takes to start taxing the pc/network/etc.

As far as I know, there isn't a problem with more than one unit using the same file. I don't remember ever trying it.

The MediaMVP forum on www.shspvr.com is very useful:
http://www.shspvr.com/forum/index.ph...67198b131a8000

You can also look at the forums on www.media-servers.com, but they don't have a whole lot of traffic.

[toscal]

Hi there,
I use a Pinnacle Sytems Show Center with a wireless g card. Using a cable link to the server it plays all the movies I have tried. These have been converted to DIVX 5.??. and also vob files. When using the wireless link the higher bit rate films suffer a bit and look jerky. Music and photos are no problem, these play flawlessly. Haven't tried the internet radio connection yet. And according to the forums you can view normally web pages, as long as they a simple in design, no Java etc. Haven't tried it myself yet.
The good thing about the Show Center is that if you don't like the Pinnacle System's software then you can use third party software such as Swiss Center, found at www.swisscenter.co.uk there in another one for linux on source forge and a German one called Oxyl box( I think thats how you spell it).
If you have a compatible TV card in the same pc as the server then it can control this to pause live tv, record tv etc.
In theory you should be able to use more than one show center with one server as you have to specify the IP address of the server PC. Don't know how it would handle two boxes looking at either different movies or the same movie for that matter though.
Oh and Philips do something similar in their Streamium range of products.
Hope this helps.

[smee]

Something to consider if you are doing multiple feeds from the same server:

Most of these (that I'm familiar with) do not handle different file formats on the box - they handle them on the server. The box itself may only be able to show an mpeg2 file (only has an mpeg2 decoder). The server is used to transcode from whatever format to mpeg2 before it is sent. This can be a pretty heavy drain on the server (especially things like divx that seem to be cpu intensive). Different boxes will need to transcode different formats - and some may not need to transcode at all.

Also, many of them will not play straight VOB rips of DVDs. In the case of the MediaMVP, if you rename the file to .mpg it will play the video but you will get no sound - the MVP doesn't have the appropriate audio decoder.

The upshot of this is that if you are really planning on showing multiple video feeds, you either need to stick with native formats (for the box) in which case you will probably be network limited or you may need to consider multiple servers in order to handle the cpu load for transcoding. Or, you can find a box that will play the formats you want to use natively - then, you are back to being network limited.

[mloebl]

I can advise do not bother with the Actiontec wireless media player... It won't work above 16colors on the display for the menus (videos/pictures do play at full color however), it can act flakey at 1080i (screen flashes), difficult to navigate MP3 lists, the Java server software is buggy, and they haven't changed the www site or support site since it was released a year ago. WWW pages are useless to view as well and slow to render and download, even on a 3mb/s Internet connection. Lastly it sometimes crashes playing Xvid as well... It's based on the same Sigma Designs reference as the Pinnacle system I believe, but Actiontec did a poor job on this.

Regards,

-Mike

[collegeboyslive]

Cool advice so far. I was planning to do a seperate wired network for the 6 boxes / server setup so i can have 100 mbps available.

since my primary goal is to create a dvd server without the sharing limitations i can encode in whatever fortmat the system wants as long as it isnt a massive file format that eats hard drive space like crazy or has on on board decoder.

surley someone out there has put in place something simalar maybe not 6 boxes but 2 or 3.

[TrOjAn]

I just ordered my Pinnacle Showcenter, software is installed already as I am trying all the free onesfirst at the moment I am logging on the the media pc with 4 others using the webinterface and playing 4 different mp3`s to each box.

I am going to try couple of .avi files in a while but Im off out for my works xmas drink in 30 minutes so I wont be doing the .avi till at least tomorow or Sunday if I have trouble sobering up :P

BTW, after researching for a week or so, the Dlink has a few issues that people are just not happy with so I decided to wait for the pinnacle showcenter.

[collegeboyslive]

BTW, after researching for a week or so, the Dlink has a few issues that people are just not happy with so I decided to wait for the pinnacle showcenter.

Yeah the unit looked nice but after trying to talk to theire tech support people I was totally turned off. then finding out what it cant do. its a shame it wouls seem so easy to go that extra step and complete it, maybe on open source one will come along.

[smee]

Yeah the unit looked nice but after trying to talk to theire tech support people I was totally turned off. then finding out what it cant do. its a shame it wouls seem so easy to go that extra step and complete it, maybe on open source one will come along.

As you read more about these devices, you'll realize how true this is. Most of them seem to be almost-there but they are missing something (features, stability, etc.).

A number of them have owner-based or open source projects associated with them, however. A number of people are working on firmware for the MediaMVP, for example (it's a tiny little Linux box). People are also working on new versions of servers for them (mostly to support Linux and Mac users). If you research any one of the devices, you'll probably find someone working on something for it.

It would be nice, however, if some company would actually come out with the perfect device themselves and continue to sell and support it (many of them dwindle away to nothing pretty quickly and show up on the surplus market).

[toscal]

So thats two of us now with Showcenters. A Homeseer plugin for it would be nice if its possible.
Just to let you know, I had problems accessing my Showcenter, it turned out to be my software firewall on the server pc preventing access. Just told it to accept the Showcenter ip address and port number.
As an experiment I tried it with Zone alarm and this also stopped the Showcenter accessing the server.

[paugusto]

MediaMVP

CBL,

I can confirm that the MediaMVP will work with at least 3 units viewing the same video at different points. Their software says it will support 6. I've got their server software running on an Athlon XP2400 processor and a 10/100 network. The only thing I had to do when I added the second one was to change from using a hub to a switch. I'm using it to view mpg2 videos that I record with their PVR-250 board.

Paul

[collegeboyslive]

cool thanks paul,


I will pic up a coupe of these units and play around with them