Digital Trends

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

Audio Playback

Actiontec's Wireless Digital Media Player supports a wide range of audio formats such as MP3, AC3, AAC, WAV, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. We tested it with all supported formats and found performance to be similar with each.

Audio sounded excellent when played through the optical connection, and as expected when played via the analog RCA jacks. With digital audio, the playback is only as good as your encoded files, and most of our files are encoded with the LAME encoder at variable bit rate, so they sound CD-quality, or close enough for most people to not notice a difference.

The player allows you to listen to audio one track at a time, in order by folder, or randomly by folder. Unfortunately, it lacks a number of features that are common in other digital media players. The Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player can not read playlists. It will read a playlist and report that it is an “Empty File.” The player also only plays music in the current folder. So if you have separate folders for each artist or album, you can't randomly play between them. You either have to have all of your music in one huge folder, or play only each album at a time. We think this will be a big issue for many users — and potentially lead to them not considering the Actiontec for purchase. It also doesn't allow you to select one song from a folder, play it and then skip to the next track. If you select one song in a folder, you're stuck playing that one song unless you go back and select the entire folder. Another annoyance we found was the inability to play a song and then cue up another song to play next. If you are listening to a track, the only way to go back to view your music list is to stop the song and go back to the main music menu. And finally, the time it takes to switch between songs when you manually progress through the tracks is a long five or more seconds. Those used to instant gratification from their CD player or PC-based audio player will find the wait too long.

The Media Player's menu allows you to select all of your media files with the remote control.

Video Playback

The Wireless Media Player supports video encoded in MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DIVX, Xvid and RPM4. We were able to successfully play back MPEG2 files recorded from cable TV through a Hauppauge WinTV 250 capture card. However, our MPEG2 files encoded in “better” quality were choppy and unwatchable when played over the wireless network. On the wired network they played perfectly smooth.

Xvid and DIVX files did not suffer any choppiness when played via the WiFi network. Some of our DIVX movies did not play at first and the player would return a message saying “Unknown Video Codec” when we tried to play them. The Media Buddy application on our media server marked those same file names in red, signifying that something was wrong with them. However, the software includes a button to re-encode DIVX files to OpenDiv3 and this enabled us to play all of our DIVX files. The conversion was quick, taking just about a minute for a 750MB video file.

Fast-forwarding and rewinding video files worked fairly well, but the player would get hung up every once in a while, especially on the MPEG2 files, and either stop the file or restart it from the beginning.

The remote control features a button called “zoom” which allows you to view movies (and pictures) in three different settings: Full Screen, Fit To Screen, and Actual Size.

High quality movies looked great on an HDTV monitor. We tested using a Samsung 43-inch HDTV and a Gateway 42-inch EDTV plasma monitor and pictures and video looked crisp and clear.