Digital Trends

Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player June 3rd, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Installation and Setup

Installation of the device is fairly straightforward and simplistic. Just hook up the desired audio and video connection, plug in the wireless card or Ethernet cable, install the “Actiontec Media Buddy” software on a Windows computer and power the media player on. Once powered up, you have to locate the media server on your network. This may take a little time and if you are not running a DHCP server, you'll have to enter the IP address and network information manually using the remote control. This is a tedious process, but thankfully only has to be done once. We had no problems hooking the media player up on wired or wireless networks, besides the time it took to manually enter the network information. It supports WEP encryption but, like we've seen in other wireless media players, not WPA. If you run a network with WPA encryption, you'll either have to change that, or look for a device that supports it.

The remote features a “Mode” button that allows you to cycle through the available display options. If you power the device up and can't view any output, this is easily fixed by hitting the “Mode” button until your current output device is selected. The Actiontec Media Player supports the following resolutions:

• Composite/S-Video NTSC
• Component NTSC
• Composite/S-Video PAL
• Component PAL
• HDTV Component 480P
• HDTV Component 720P
• HDTV Component 1080i
• DVI 480P
• DVI 720P
• DVI 1080i
• DVI 600x480
• DVI 800x600
• DVI 1024x768
• DVI 852x480 (Plasma) 

The Media Buddy software works on any Windows operating system (98 and up) and the company lists minimum hardware requirements as a 700MHz Pentium III or higher if you want to use the device for streaming video. We installed our test server on an Abit AT7-Max2 motherboard with an Athlon XP 1600+ and 512MB of PC 2700 DDR. This system was more than adequate.

The rear of the device features both analog and digital connections - including a HDTV compatible DVI port.

Although setup is easy, it can take quite a bit of time. If you have a large number of media files — and if you're thinking of buying the Actiontec you probably do — it will take the program a while to scan all of your media. Once you install the software you then tell it what folders to scan for pictures, video and music. Admittedly, we had a very large collection of music to scan — just over 5,000 audio, video and image files - but it took over 6 ˝ minutes.

One reason why the setup and media scan takes so long is that the program creates a thumbnail image for each picture in your collection.