I have used dlink media players for years having two dsm-520's and one 320. I was happy with them, especially the 520's. For christmas I got a popcorn hour A-110 player which has a hard drive installed internally and plays every single file I have thrown at it, x264/mkv, HD-wmv, xvid/divx, nero/mp4. I have blu-ray rips at 1920x1080p at a 14Mbs bitrate that play flawlessly on the A-110.
I'm not here to toot the A-110's horn just explaining my situation.
After the previous success and the fact that my movie collection is going towards HD video, most of which is in x264/mkv and some in wmv, I decided to give the extender player a try by purchasing a DSM-750. I have to say honestly, so far it has been very very disappointing. Here are the issues:
1.) First off, an extender would imply that the player is an extension of what's on the computer but that doesn't seem to be the case as I have installed all of the codecs on the computer like, divx, cccp and all of the videos that play on the A-110 and most through media lounge play on the computer through windows media center, no problem there. However, when trying to play on the extender through the extenders version of windows media center, the only thing I can get to play is xvid, not HD-x264/mkv and not HD-wmv. both give the codec error. Incidently, the HD-wmv files show a good picture thumbnail and looks like it would play but shortly after it's selected, codec error.
2.) On the computer I can select the NAS mapped drive to watch and my 500+ mostly xvid movies show up and play fine. However, on the 750, the mapped drive doesn't show up when you search for shared folders, nor does the shared partition.
3.) to me, if the extender doesn't work correctly then it is useless as I already have players that stream HD video with no problem from disk and twonkyvision servers. I was strictly looking for the amentity of sifting through picture thumbnails of movies instead of file names to select a movie.
4.) The one good thing I can say about the 750 is that when streaming video from a server the video itself looks excellent, deep contrast and clarity. Other than that though, for me it has been a bust.
Speed is not an issue as i have the 750 wired directly to my router and when measuring network performance it shows bars all the way to the top. Even when streaming xvid movies from my twonkyvision server it will hang every now and then for a second or two and when I swap it out with the 520 in exactly the same spot steaming from the same point it plays fine. It's hard to believe that a two year old 520 plays better than a brand new 750, maybe that's why they delayed delivery to the market for over a year after announced at the 2007 CES?
If someone could explain how to make the 750 extender recognize my NAS and play x264/mkv and HD-wmv files I would definetly change my opinion but until then I would say that this has been an exteme let-down. Transcoding with tversity is not a real option and shouldn't be necessary it could only cause degredation of the video.
Also, I haven't even looked at mp3, I could care less about that. just interested in video
The os on the computer is 32bit vista ultimate sp1
Another problem is there's not much out there on the 750, I guess not that many people own one or maybe I'm the only one that's had problems, who knows. Any rate there's just not a lot of good info on troubleshooting the 750 and calling their support will make you want to poke your eyes out with a spoon after having to get everything repeated 5 times because the tech is not in this country.
Oh well, I guess I'll try searching for answers a couple more days and then try to cut my losses on ebay.
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Topic: Close to 86ing the extender effort (Read 5210 times)