Breaking wind: the stinking man's trumpet
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Divx claims home video breakthrough
ALTHOUGH IT'S an obvious breakthrough in home entertainment technology, the INQ isn't comfortable with D-link's claims over video quality made at the its European launch of the DSM-330 home media box in London, yesterday [9th October].
The whole caboodle is powered by video compression technology developed by France's Divx. And there's the rub. Although the company claims its format is supported by most players shipped in France, Germany, and the UK, the really good content is all on a site called Stage6.
The idea with the 330 is that you an send video content (which hopefully you've already paid for), around the house with impunity and certainly no extra rental fees.
The 330box uses the latest UI software from Divx. and, yes, the 330 is an obviously a piece of cake to use for replaying video files. But then there were huge questions raised of over the range of media files the 330 could play back.
In a nutshell, what the 330 does it take existing content from your PC's hard disk or the internet and then displays it over the latest display gear such as HD flat screen TVs.
Although the box can do transcoding on the fly, the best results are obtained
if you perform the conversion beforehand.
What was totally unclear is to how fast the system performs this task. The
official advice seems to be that you put existing video content through the
Divx mill before committing yourself to an upgrade in terms of required
hardware.
One thing is for certain at present - you can only use the 330 if your PC is turned on and acting as the server. A standalone version appears some way off.
As an obvious means of distributing content – both local and internet based – around the house – especially via a wireless connexion, the 330 is ideal.
D-link Europe claimed quite convincingly that they've over-spec'ed this particular device so it should survive several technological advances before you need to replace it.
It's also competitively priced at £129.99 including tax and a bundled HD TV cable.
D-link's time-to-market advantage with the 330 – due to be released in November 2007, will definitely give it an edge.
But those waking up next to the 330 on December 25th will be left wondering exactly what it is they've bought into. µ
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The open source community beat both Netgear and D-Link by years with the truly fantastic and very well polished XMBC (XBox Media Center). I can play content direct from my computer, from a disk in the XBox, or from the XBox hard drive. It play's every format I've ever tried on it and has a great user friendly interface. 

The biggest drawback is the XBox just isn't fast enough to play HD content properly, and you need a hacked XBox to run it on. I wish one of these manufacturers would build a hardware platform designed to run the XBMC software.
Netgear beat D-Link to this with the EVA8000 which plays a lot more formats including HD x264 without the need for transcoding, and also streams from a NAS as well as a PC shared drive.
Don't know much about the 330, but I have the DSM-320 at home and it's pretty good. Of course, it can't play HD files because of the machine's limited processing power, but it does fine with 'normal' divx and mpeg2. Sure you have to leave the computer on, but that's not a trouble, right ? No dvd burning anymore, it comes straight into the little box through wifi. If the 330 can do hd streams, it'll surely be worth its money.
Reviews of the EVA8000 seem to suggest that the device was released before the firmware was finished, just take a look at the reviews on Amazon UK for a flavour of the abuse it's receiving. I'm hoping D-Link can do better as I urgently need a replacement for the dead Pinnacle Showcentre sitting in my lounge.