Digital Trends

Linksys WMA11B April 16th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Viewing Pictures

The ability for the Wireless-B Media Adapter to play images on your TV separates it from the audio-only networked media devices on the market, and Linksys did a pretty good job with it.

The ‘Pictures' menu gives you three options: ‘Choose Pictures', ‘Now Showing', and ‘Options'. The ‘Choose Pictures' screen lets you select the pictures you want to view. You can select all pictures, specific folders or specific images. The ‘Now Showing' screen displays thumbnail images of the selected pictures.

Once you select the images you want to view, pressing the Play button on the remote will start a slideshow. You can use the Play/Pause, Stop, Next and Back buttons on the remote to control the slideshow. In the Options menu you can change settings such as slide duration, turn on or off slideshow shuffle, or select if you want slideshows to repeat once they are complete.

If you start music first and then go into the Pictures menu, you can listen to music while viewing your images.

Audio and Video Quality

Audio quality on the Media Adapter is about as good as we expected with the analog RCA jack outputs. True audiophiles may be disappointed but we think the sound will be acceptable to the majority of listeners.

However, there were a few glitches in the sound. There is a noticeable “pop” when moving from one song to another. This pop only happens when you skip from the middle of one song to another. It does not happen when a song ends and the player automatically plays the next song.

We also experienced a strange problem with one of our music selections - the CD “All Killer No Filler” by Sum 41. This CD was ripped using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and encoded with the LAME encoder as is the majority of our test digital music collection. We have played these same 13 tracks over and over again on Winamp and Microsoft Media Player, portable players, car MP3 players and other networked media devices, such as the SliMP3 and have never experienced a problem. With the Linksys Media Adapter, there was a strange series of loud squeals before each song in this collection. We're not sure what to make of it but it was quite startling the first time we heard it.

Visual quality was also about as good as we expected when viewing high-resolution digital images on a low-resolution television. Overall, the images looked excellent and were only a bit grainy at very close distances.