Digital Trends

Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player

June 28th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Setup (continued)

The Streaming Media Server is a pretty robust application, but it does have a few quirks. Our biggest issue is that when viewing a list of music there is a column for song name, artist, album, duration, location of the file and media type. Unfortunately, this list can not be sorted by any of these fields — it will only sort in alphanumeric order. The application has some features that we haven't seen in other networked media devices also. It allows you to pick from three different thumbnail image sizes, can prevent your computer from going into hibernate or sleep mode, and it even allows you to backup and restore your media database — presumably so you don't have to rescan if you uninstall and reinstall the program. You can also select to remove an artist, album or file from the media list in the application, or from your computer altogether. Another feature we liked is the ability to transcode movies at one of four quality settings, meaning it will encode them in the DivX or Xvid format it can read. This is also something that will slow the media scan down.

Once the Streaming Media Server is installed, you can turn on the ADC-320 and hope that it finds your wireless network and finds the server. With a DHCP-enabled network and a strong enough signal, the device should be able to find your server. If not, you can manually enter the required information in the on-screen display with the remote control. As with other wireless networked media devices we have reviewed here, the ADC-320 only supports WEP encryption. If you run WPA encryption on your network, you'll have to change to the less-secure WEP in order for the DVD player to work with it. However, Gateway provides a firmware upgrade tool for the player so there is a chance that they could add that functionality in the future.

The rear of the ADC-320 is similar to a regular DVD player, but with a PC card slot.