Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player

Reviews: Networking

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis
Actiontec
May. 1, 2005

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Quality Check

The overall design of the device was smooth and classy looking, but this won't last long! The wireless B card protrudes from the side of the receiver and sticks out like a sore thumb. The front has no buttons or knobs, and the lights are only visible when the system is on, so it is a very clean front display. The device is not very tall and should fit easily into an exiting home theater setup without drawing too much attention to itself. I would give the overall design (minus the wireless card sticking out of the side) an A.

The software that runs the media receiver, Media Buddy, was nothing too impressive. It did its job fairly well, although I would have liked to see a few more features built into it. I am sure future releases can fix any small problems that might crop up. I will note that I seemed to have fewer problems with the software properly recognizing my files, especially audio playlists, when it was installed on a windows 2000 machine rather than the usual Windows XP test system. I am not sure why, but consider it a simple observation.

The remote control for the media receiver is not horrible, but it also isn't the best design I have seen. Most of the buttons that I found myself using were cramped down towards the bottom and were not as easy to reach since I have long fingers. During navigation within the player, I am uncertain if it was network lag, poor remote angle, the remote buttons, or if the software was just lagging, but many times I had trouble progressing in the media player. Thinking it was locked up I would frantically push more buttons only for it to surge forward with my original request. The very first time I operated the device I discovered the poor remote control angle. The angle was so poor, in fact, that I had to turn the device towards me just to get anything accomplished with it.

I now come to the wireless portion of the player. Since it uses the 802.11b protocol, the best security that it supports is 128-bit WEP which is known to be not secure, especially when compared to the new WPA standard. Besides this utter lack of security awareness, this requires you to operate an 802.11b AP, which, if you have a newer speed boosted 802.11g AP, will require you to basically cripple its speed. The choppy MPEG2 playback doesn't help either. Besides these major flaws, the wireless card sticks way out the side and looks horrible as well as gets in the way. In my opinion, this device should be marketed as a 10/100 Mb Ethernet wired media player, not a wireless one.

Conclusion

Home theaters and computers; these two havens of technology are usually separated from each other, never to dip into each others multimedia pool. Now with new devices called Multimedia Players, we can finally bring the locked up digital content of our computers to the HiFi world of big TV's and loud stereos. Actiontec's attempt at a Digital Media Player has hit most of the target in terms of what it should do. Its ability to play audio files from your computer guarantees that you can finally put to good use all the stereo equipment you bought in college, as well as watch those funny video clips of people doing stupid stuff on a screen larger than 19".

I admit that Actiontec has created a very useful device; I will be using this long after this review is done, but they have failed miserably with the wireless implementation. The ugly card sticking out the side is only the beginning; the most heinous crime was the use of 802.11b and the failure to support the WPA security protocol. In my book this is the highest of crimes, especially for a device that appears to hold so much promise, its one saving grace is the 10/100 Mb Ethernet jack in the rear. With that simple interface, this device holds some promise and therefore its future placement with my entertainment center is promising. Without this connection, you would be forced into weak security protocols, the inability to play the MPEG2 files off your TV capture card and would probably feel pretty screwed.

Pros

Video back on your TV
Music playback from your stereo
Plenty of output choices
Software is unobtrusive
10/100 Mb Ethernet jack

Cons

Not 802.11g compliant
No WPA security
MPEG2 lag using wireless
Wireless card sticks out obtrusively
Poor remote receiving angle

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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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