Friday, April 14, 2006

D-Link DSM-320 Media Player


I bought the D-Link DSM-320 Media Player the other day.

The DSM-320 is a complete digital entertainment center. Enjoy your music, video and photos when and where you want it—in your living room, bedroom, den, or anywhere you have a TV. Once connected to your home network, the DSM-320 accesses PC stored media content to play digital music on your surround sound system, watch your home movies and display a slideshow of your photos all on your big screen TV.
I found few problems installing it. I have a D-Link AirPlus™ G DI-524 Wireless Router which I have used to create a wireless netowrk here. The Medial Player found the network and connected effortlessly.

The media player server software was not quite so intuitive however.
There were a few little things that were not apparent so I had several goes at setting it up before getting it right.

First off the software only runs when the PC is logged in, not just turned on. I installed it on my SBS server and then logged out. While I was logged in the software was running and the Media Player picked up the server and instantly found all the shared files. However as soon as I logged off the server the Media Player could not find the server. I have compromised on this for now by logging in remotely to the server and then killing the login session while leaving myself logged in.

Second the Media Player can only connect to one server at a time. We have media files spread across several machines on our network here. The SBS server holds all the music, photos and some home video. My PC has a hard drive with movie files on it and one of the kids PC's has a folder with all the kids cartoons and kids movies. So my first attempt at setting up media servers on each of these machines, although succesful, was aborted because the media player could only connect to one at a time. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the family to navigate. The solution was to map all these drives onto the SBS server, and then share them from there.

Finally I discovered that my folder structure (while fine for a PC) is possibly not the best for a media server. Having lots of folders isn't the easiest way to navigate when the player lets you only navigate through a page of 8 folders at a time.

I will probably end up buying a couple of 250Gb drives and mirroring them in a raid array on one PC and setting the server up on that, and then moving everything to it.

In terms of the operation of the media player it works almost flawlessly. Certainly I had no problems when I tried the wired network connection. We have noticed the odd freeze of both music and video when running wirelessly. Our media room is 20 metres away from the closest network connection (also the Wireless Router) - and about 35 metres in cable run distance so we prefer the wireless connection.

The setup menu is well laid out and fairly intuitive. System is where you find the options for the media server, which was possibly poorly named. However everything else is good. You can change aspect ratio and video and audio outputs. Unfortunately you can't do this on the fly from within media (eg pause a movie and change aspect ratio) but its a simple matter to exit the movie, go back to the main menu and change the setting then go back and restart the movie.
Sound and video is great and upscaling for low resolution material onto the big screen is great. I haven't tried it with the projector yet but I will later.
We are running the optical audio out and the sound is very clear. It is now showing up my home cinema 5.1 surround system. It is due to be replaced in September with some better HiFi gear.

I rate this machine highly and a great addition to any HiFi or home theatre system where the user has a lot of media on the PC that they would like to be able to see on their TV, big or small screen. It could just as easily be relocated to the bedroom temorarily to watch a movie in bed. Our little bedroom TV connected easily although only composite audio and video connections the image was crisp and the sound clear.


Posted by: Jethro | 1:46 PM |