Gateway's Connected DVD Player

Michael Gartenberg | July 29, 2003, 08:19 AM

I have been spending some time with Gareway's new connected DVD Player. Overall, I am quite impressed but there are still some rough edges that need to be smoothed out before this product will have mass appeal.

First, the product maps into features that consumers with home networks want, namely to view video and photos on their TV sets and stream audio content to their stereo (it’s also a very nice progressive scan DVD player). Set up was fairly simple, install some media serving software on my PC (an Windows Media Center Edition), tell it which folders stream content from and import the files. Setup on the TV side was even easier. I imply replaced my old DVD player and plugged the cables in and a standard Linksys WiFi card gets plugged in the back. The player found the network immediately and the PC designated as the server. Files streamed as advertised (and I spent of good deal of the weekend watching the first season of the West Wing, arguably the best season of that show). Pictures were viewed and songs streamed as advertised.

There are a few things that need addressing. First, there’s too much work that needs to be done on the PC side to create play lists and organize albums and the like. Why it doesn’t entirely map to the carefully organized structure on my PC makes it more frustrating to use than it should. Also, there are limitations on the content it will stream. While MPEG1 video was fine, the player knew nothing about the PVR content stored on the Media Center in Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media format. This is a bit ironic since Gateway sells Media Center Edition PCs as well as the connected DVD player. Since that content is encrypted, there’s not even a simple way to convert those files to MPEG 1.

Overall, the product does what it is advertised to do and while it may be more of an enthusiast as opposed to mainstream product, it points to the future quite nicely.