Multimedia Sharing Just Isn't There Yet - BizReport

http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=5748

"The $2,000 Gateway 610XL could easily be mistaken for the 17-inch LCD it's built around. Its components are hidden inside and behind that wide-format screen to minimize its bulk, and its wireless keyboard, mouse and remote control do not drape any cables across a table or carpet.

It runs Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 software, which offers a large-type interface for playing music, viewing photos, and watching and recording TV from the nearest recliner. This updated version restores some of the features the first release left out in an effort to simplify things; it can now accompany songs with on-screen visualizations, play FM and some online radio, do basic touch-ups of photos and display laughably condensed news summaries.

Alas, those upgrades don't make the Media Center much more pleasant to use. It still took too long to configure for my cable box, and its TV picture looked washed out. The only Web radio stations you can tune in with the remote are those presented in a selective, non-searchable list.

Furthermore, the 610's hardware and software showed the industry's usual carelessness: obsolete or crippled software (shouldn't $2,000 buy you the full version of a program?), an unmarked cover hiding its memory-card slots, a sleep mode that stopped working after I used the system-restore DVD to bring the computer back to its original state."

"Gateway's Connected DVD Player gets the concept right. By building WiFi into a box that's already in the living room, it avoids adding to our collections of remote controls. But Gateway's implementation of the idea is another thing.

I loved the Connected DVD Player's $200 price, but not much else. Getting the slim box on my WiFi network was an ordeal -- first I had to type the standard 26-digit password into an onscreen form that displayed only 25 characters, then the player refused to log on until I disabled the encryption on my WiFi network. Trust me, that's not good.

Once you've installed a server program on the Windows PC with your music, photo and video files -- and reconfigured its firewall software -- you can see how bad the DVD player's onscreen interface is for browsing your digital media.

It lets you view music files by album, artist or song title, but not by any playlists you'd set up, nor does its remote let you shuffle the order of playback. Songs I'd bought at the Musicmatch and Napster sites weren't available at all.

Photos, in turn, are listed only by file names, without any preview of their contents. If a picture is on its side, you can't flip it to view it correctly.

You can view video files, including Media Center recordings of TV shows, but the DVD player's 802.11b WiFi receiver was too slow for the job, leading to stutters and pauses that reminded me of watching Web video over dial-up.

Gateway says the next version of the device will add faster 802.11g WiFi and some interface improvements, but the list of things that need improvement here is dismayingly long."

"Next, I moved to the Roku HD1000, a $500 set-top box that -- when coupled with an external WiFi adapter, at extra cost -- offered a considerably more elegant way to get to the music and photos on a home computer.

Since the Roku box uses the same Windows file-sharing protocol that PCs (and Macs) support, it doesn't make you install any extra software on a computer; it will detect your shared music and photo files automatically once it's on your network. Unlike the Gateway DVD player, it joined two WiFi networks properly. I did, however, have to tell it each network's name with an onscreen keyboard, since it can't detect WiFi networks automatically.

But Roku's simplicity also limits its utility. Using it is just like logging in from another PC -- you have to drill down to particular folders with the remote to find the song or photo you want. Like the Gateway DVD player, its remote lacks a "shuffle" button.

The Roku does best at slide shows; it can zoom in and out of photos, rotate them, and display info about when and how they were taken. It even supports connections to monitors and high-definition TV sets.


Roku's HD 1000 (Courtesy Roku)

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Roku is planning to add such features as compatibility with MP3 playlists. Such updates and a price cut would do a lot to broaden its appeal. So would Gateway using Roku's software on its next DVD player.

Microsoft, in turn, would do well to see where this is heading. Why can't this company combine its popular WiFi gear with its even more popular Xbox video-game console to give us a cheap, wireless digital-media receiver?"