Buyer's Guide

What ZDNet UK's editors want for Christmas

ZDNet UK ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Dec 2004

Having a two-year old daughter, I take way too many photos -- all of them digital, naturally. My music is mostly ripped to MP3 format on a hard drive on one of several computers, although I haven't yet got round to ripping the vinyl; the next job is to start ripping movies.

The thing is, I don't really buy the convergence story that says we'll all be watching movies on our PCs and accessing the Internet on TV screens. That said, connecting the TV to the PC does make some sense. What I really need to go with this is a media player that will access my photos, music and videos, and pump them through the hi-fi/TV/projector setup. I like the look of the D-Link DSM-320 Wireless Media Player, which is designed to slide in among the rest of your hi-fi/TV gear.

Being the first wireless media player to support 802.11g, this looks well-suited for streaming videos.

There's no shortage of connectors on the back -- coax, optical and composite audio, S-Video, composite and component video, plus a wired Ethernet port. The remote control has direct access buttons for music, photo, video and online media, and what I've seen of the on-screen display looks pretty useful: it shows elapsed time, artist, song, album, genre and next song. It plays most formats, including MP3, WMA and WAVaudio files for music; MPEG1/2/4, AVI, QuickTime and Xvid for video; and JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, BMP and PNG formats for images.

The only thing that's missing is a hard disk to turn it into a PVR-type device. But a little bird tells me that might be coming next year, so maybe I'll hang on a little longer just in case…

D-Link

Price
£129.99 (inc. VAT)