Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player

Reviews: Networking

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis
Actiontec
May. 1, 2005

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Testing

So how do you go about testing a Digital Media Player? Well, you watch and listen to digital media of course. I want to see what the limits of this machine are. What it will play and what it won't. I decided to start off small and begin with audio files.

Audio

To test this, I placed various mp3 files within the music directories and then went over to the receiver to listen to them. Getting to the music is pretty easy, you can either use the number to select music, or you can hit the music button on the remote. After a short pause, the music available to you will show up. Scrolling down with the arrow key, I select the folder that contains my music. The songs are then listed for me. Pressing the enter key will begin playing the song, and as I found out, only that song. To play all the music you must move your selection up to the top and select the "play" or "play random" wording. Only then will it play all the tracks in the list. This was a minor annoyance, but the major problem I had with the music selection was its inability to handle much of a file structure. I pointed the media buddy to a separate hard drive, "M," which contained folders with artist and albums. The media failed to show up at all even though I had several GB of music nicely organized. The best method I discovered to get music to play was to create playlists within Winamp and then go from there using the *.m3u playlist files. I have found that saving playlists to a central location allows me to listen to large amounts of music without having to place it in a central location, especially the My Documents folder which has a tendency to get formatted over a lot in my house.

During music playback, the artist and title scroll across the bottom of the screen and some images which will get pretty boring very fast change above it. I found that when I wanted to listen to music, I usually just turned off the TV and left the receiver active.

A digital oscilloscope would have been a great feature to have added to the music playback. Something that moved to the music, rather than static images which just changed after a few seconds. There is a way to change the background images to one of your photo albums, but I found the pictures went by too fast and sometimes didn't even work properly.

Video

For the video portion of the review, I chose to extract a small segment of "The Matrix" from the DVD. Once extracted, I used CyberLink's PowerDirector which I just happened to have lying around. With it I was able to produce differing types of encoding. These included DV-AVI, DivX (Low, Medium, and High), MPEG1 (Good, Better, Best), and MPEG2 (Good, Better, Best). Using these settings I rendered video only, no audio (because I managed to screw something up and lost the audio) into each format and placed it in a directory for the Media Buddy.

I was unable to play any of the DivX encoded files no matter the quality. The MPEG1 files played flawlessly and were only characterized by their quality. The MPEG2 files had no codec problems, but did suffer from poor bandwidth when using the wireless connection. I found that when connected to the wireless, MPEG2 playback yielded choppy results which were not apparent when hard-wired into the 100 Mb connection. As such, the lowest quality of MPEG2 showed the least amount choppiness. The big issue with this is that many of the TV capture cards on the market record directly to MPEG2 format. The PowerColor 550 Theater card I previously reviewed has this option. When paired with Snapstream's Beyond TV, I was able to record a program on the computer, then play it back through my TV. When using the wireless connection, playback was not possible due to the stuttering and jittering of the picture. The receiver also will not play any type of Quicktime (.mov) files. I was able to get audio off them, but that is all. Playing AVI files is a hit or miss affair, some of the AVI files I had lying around played fine, while others had sound, but no video. The AVI playback is entirely dependant on the codec used to compress it, kind of like roulette for your digital content.

Photos

The photo display feature of the player works similar to that of the audio and video. By pointing the media buddy to a specific folder, you can then view those photos in a slide show. You can also setup some music to play along with your slide show if you are into that sort of thing. Within the media buddy, you can select the duration the photos cycle for. The graphics I loaded had no display problems. I really wouldn't consider this a major feature, but it was functional.

Internet

The media player, being connected to the network, has the ability to browse and connect to the internet. I will say that attempting to read a web page through this device is painful at best. This is due to the multimedia content that is prevalent on the web currently, besides that, you will be navigating with the tab button, and if you have ever tried to use Windows without a mouse, you will know just how long and frustrating this experience will be. Therefore, I would consider the Internet feature useless unless you have a stash of web pages that are primarily text based.

Even though the internet browsing feature is a bust, this player does have the ability to pick up internet radio. You browse the various internet radio stations by musical genre. Selecting a genre of music then lists the various radio stations available to you. If you have ever used the internet radio feature on other software, such as Winamp, this will be very simple and familiar. One thing to note about internet radio is that it is usually broadcast at lower bit rates such as 56 or 64 kbps. This might not normally be noticed if you are used to listening to crappy computer speakers, but put the signal through some decent ones, and the lack of quality will become apparent. This is not necessarily an issue with the player, but rather the original signal.

A final subset of the internet feature is the News functionality. This selection gives you choices of news sources, mostly from yahoo news. These allow you to see the latest headlines, something that might be useful if you don't have a computer nearby and you just can't find the remote to change the TV over to CNN.

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Page 1: Introduction & First Looks
Page 2: Installation
Page 3: Testing
Page 4: Quality Check & Conclusion

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3 User Comments

1 - Posted by Nick on May 1, 2005 - 8:15 pm

What was the video quality like on the unit? Any of the digital media players that ive worked with had a software component resident on the computer that transcoded the files into a mpeg stream that got sent over the wire. The quality was decent but any motion had some rather unsightly pixellation. Does this player work the same or does it actually play the file right off the computer?

2 - Posted by Rich on May 1, 2005 - 11:16 pm

From the looks of it I would say that it actually decodes it in the player, otherwise a lot more stuff should have worked. The video quality was pretty good, if the source is a good one, there is no reason you shouldn't get a nice picture on your tv. Just make sure you have a hard wired connection. I was really surprised that it 802.11b couldn't handle the stream, but then again, it is 802.11b. I had some video files which had been recorded from either HD or satellite and they looked amazing, even on my crappy TV using component video.

3 - Posted by MaNiAk21 on May 4, 2005 - 2:14 pm

I've got a similar product for my PS2, the GameShark Media Player (http://www.madcatzstore.com/store/viewItem.asp?idP...). Everything runs perfect (wired) as long as the file is encoded correctly, and that has only been a problem on a couple of occasions. Usually, things work just fine straight from download, and it sure beats my S-Video out, and messind with dual-monitor through TV-out is a pain..

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