This weekend I decided to give the D-Link DSM-510 and Netgear EVA8000 a try to see which one would be able to stream my digital video to my HD TV (46" Sharp LC-46D82U. The key areas I was interested in are ease of setup, ease of use, codec support and general reliability. I'll start with my favorite, the D-Link DSm-510 (I'll review the Netgear in my next post).
Ease of setup - 8/10
So I started with the D-Link, it really was what I was planning to get, I only got the Netgear unit because I saw it on the shelf. It's a very small box so pretty easy to stick anywhere. Being an A/V kinda guy I genearlly don't like non-standard sized gear. When you have odd ball things (like my XBox and Wii) they can really mess up the look of your setup (hear that game console makers, some of us want square boxes!). This thing is so small though that you could easily tuck it away from sight completely (as long as use used some sort of IR distrubution system). When I fired it up it was already set to 1080i and came up just fine. The first screen you are greeted with for setup looks very nice and well done (clearly not an Apple or Microsoft product but ok). A wizard walks you through the setup first asking about network settings. Even though I have Ethernet at with my gear I decided to only use WiFi so I could test it in the way most people would use it. I hit the first negative here when I have to put in the WEP key. Rather than giving me a screen with only Hex characters on it I'm present with a screen of letters, not even in QWERTY format. To make it worse you have to switch back and forth from letters to numbers so you have to key many, many times to put in an already long WEP key. It easily took me 3-4 minutes just to type the key in, terrible, terrible design. After you get the WEP key in you have to reboot, the first of 3 in the setup process.
Once you get rebooted and connected to your network (assuming no typos in the WEP key - luckily I got it right the first time) you are asked if you want to update the firmware from the net. Of course I said yes, it downloaded it and update itself (very nice). After the update it had to reboot (not surprising on this one) for reboot #2. Of course the firmware update wipes the device so guess what, you have to redo the entire WEP key and reboot dance wasting another 5 minutes!!! Bargh!!! They must be able to store the config separately when doing the firmware upgrade. Again I say bargh!!!
After all of this you are ready to connect to your PC. This is where things can get a bit tricky if you don't know what you're doing or what you want. The unit does come with it's own sharing software but since I don't like to run anything I don't have to I was hoping for a better solution. I was hoping that it could just read from network shares but alas, no such luck. It does support UPnP so I was able to setup Windows Media Player 11 on my XP machine to share it's library. Then I imported a chunk of my media into WMP (which I don't generally use) so i could test it. After getting sharing all turned on I went back to the D-Link to see what I could see.
Ease of use - 7/10
Happily I was browsing my media and quickly playing video after video. For this review I am only concerned with the video capabilities so I haven't even tried the other functions yet. Browsing through your collection is relatively snappy, if you open a folder with 20+ files it can take a few seconds to index them all before display. All in all much snappier than my Vista box though. The interface definetly is basic but gets the job done. Browsing your media by folders is the best for me since I have everything very organized in a large folder tree. The unit does have a USB port on the front but I haven't tried that just yet, if it doesn't work as simple as I assume I'll be sure to post an update.
Codec Support - 7/10
While the DSM-510 doesn't support a ton of codecs it supports the major ones, with the exception of QuickTime and RealVideo (which I have none of). It was able to play most of the things I threw at it, there were a few WMV files that it wouldn't play but I'm not sure why. It had no trouble with all my DviX files and even played a 720p HD DivX file just fine (although it did get a bit jumpy over WiFi the longer I let it play). The video quality is very good (I'm running over HDMI), from my 10 foot couch test I can't see a difference between it and my Vista Media Center PC. So if you're looking to be able to view internet based video (where DivX reighs supreme) this is a great box for you.
Conclusion - 8/10
While not a perfect device by any means this really is a great box. I had it up and running in about 30 minutes and after using it for most of the day I am impressed. If I were considering digital video in my home theatre and I didn't care about DVR functions this would be the box I would get. If I didn't already have a Vista Media Center PC this would be the box I would likely use. Small, inexpensive, easy to use, fast, with great picture quality this thing is the way to go. Highly recommended.
