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Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player Reviewed
Anonymous Howard writes "Designtechnica has a review of a Gateway ADC-320, a home theater device that will play not only DVDs, but media clips off the network. Supported types include DivX, Xvid, Mpeg1 & 2, MP3 and WMA. The thought of a networked media device is not new, but I'm curious as to how many people actually own one? How well do they work? What are the best ones? Is UP&P support worth the extra money? Is this the future of all DVD players for the home theater?"
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
However, I do take exception regarding the consistency of the unit's operation. For no apparent reason the picture will sometimes freeze or the audio will go out of sync. I am quite experienced with home audio setup and have ruled out all the obvious causes. I've come to the conclusion that the components and/or firmware of the device aren't exactly top notch.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Gateway has promised Divx support but it has not happened. The nasty secret is in the Windows only software one must use to share files with the player. It does not provide the option to import DivX, hence it cannot be shared, hence even if the firmware supports it, you cannot stream it.
Trust me, I update to the latest version of the Media Server (2.1 B07.08).
While bitching about things, some dual layer disks are too much for the player to handle and black scroll wanders by the screen.
Analog 5.1. Yuck.
That said, it is likely as close as one can get to the out of the box solution right now.
s2 tivo with usb to ethernet and then mfs_ftp to extract and reinsert shows.
a moded xbox with xbmp/xbmc is one of the best if now the best network attacked media players and for under $200 one of the cheapest
Wow, all of those great features, and still crippled by regions. Doesn't matter so much to Americans I suppose, but as an Australian I won't consider a region crippled player, as heaps of DVDs aren't avaliable Region 4 (Australia), so I have to get them from Amazon, of course mostly region 1.
I know how you feel. Whenever this topic gets brought up someone always mentions the xbox and it seems to get dismissed. You can get these on ebay for somewhere around $85 new. Mod it for free and fun, and it will be able to do this dvd player can and more. XBMC has become one of the most amazing open source projects as far as I'm concerned. Another project called X-Link has now been integrated into xbmc meaning it can function similarly to xbox-live, only for free. I use xbmc as my dashboard, so i turn on my xbox and it's all there, music, games, weather, movies, x-link, emulators... all with a really fantastic looking interface. I don't know why i feel the need to evangelize this, but I guess I still can't really believe it myself and I've had it for years.