Move Media to the Big Screen: D-Link MCE : Is the Microsoft Experience Enough?

By William Van Winkle , published on February 3, 2009 at 4:50 PM
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There’s nothing really wrong with D-Link’s MCE implementation. Its weaknesses are Microsoft’s. You’re at Microsoft’s mercy when it comes to what you can watch. Microsoft obviously prefers Microsoft-friendly media formats. For content, expect to find commercial sites weighted toward MSN or similar Microsoft-affiliated properties. Big names like Flickr should be listed in this MCE but aren’t. in general, the quality of the free online video and audio content here, whether within MCE or MediaLounge, is decidedly behind the times. Video tends to look like it spooled off of a trampled videocassette and streaming audio is usually far below CD quality. Should you expect more? Perhaps. But you get what you pay for, and some of the content services are still in beta. What’s comforting is that D-Link is assiduous about pumping out patches and updates, so if it’s possible for D-Link to provide a higher quality experience on the DSM-750, then the company will probably offer it for free as soon as possible. What providers like Microsoft and its content partners decide to do with the quality and bit rates is anyone’s guess. But you can expect that there will always be premium, higher-quality services to pay for.

Even with these limitations, the DSM-750 is relatively easy to use given its feature flexibility, and it’s a good fit for those with a wide variety of media types to support. Having two interfaces is both a positive and negative, but for anyone who considers himself of herself beyond the level of novice when it comes to media, it’s better to err on the side of more options and support.
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Comments
Anonymous 02/04/2009 8:09 PM
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1) it doesn't seem to support the mkv file format ;
2) this reviews says nothing about how streaming 720p or 1080p video looks like on the TV ;
3) What upscaling feature does it have?

williamvw 02/05/2009 12:01 PM
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Very good points. As you probably know, Matroska (MKV) is still very rare in the hardware world. In fact, I think of all the players I've seen, only the WD TV HD natively supports it.

Streaming video looks good on the DSM-750. In fact, it looks good on most players if you have a solid LAN connection. In general, I've found that the quality of the source video is carried over to the TV pretty faithfully. If you start with 640x480 video shot with a digital camera, it's going to look grainy and blocky...which is just how it looks when the DSM-750 passes it to the TV. This is the lowest resolution I evaluated players with, so I'm not sure how much upscaling you're asking about. Having now tried over half a dozen extender-type products recently, I can tell you that I found all of them satisfactory for video playback. The quality bottleneck is almost always with the source content.

I'll add that I also tended to avoid upscaling in my tests. I'd rather look at a higher quality image in the center of the screen than a blocky, interpolated one stretched across the whole display. I know that's not the perfect, quantified answer you were probably hoping for, but I tested these products as I thought they'd be most commonly used by the average user.

Anonymous 02/05/2009 12:30 PM
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Does the extended MCE interface support DivX/Xvid etc yet?

williamvw 02/05/2009 6:27 PM
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I've never seen DivX done on MCE, but before I opened my mouth, I thought I'd Google the question first. I found this:

http://www.jakeludington.com/xbox/ [...] aming.html

This details how to do DivX and XviD on the Xbox 360. So far as I've seen, MCE is MCE no matter what you run it on, so I'd say the odds of this same work-around taking care of you on an MCE extender like D-Link's are good. If you try it out, please post and tell us what you find.

tomminator 02/05/2009 11:04 PM
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Can this device play media from a Windows Home Server?
If yes, what is necessary on the server side?
And can it play media from a UPnP AV / DLNA server?

williamvw 02/06/2009 1:21 AM
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I passed your question on to my D-Link contact, who replies:

"Yes, the advantage of the DSM-750 is that it has both Extender mode as well as MediaLounge mode. So while the Extender mode is great for people with a Media Center PC, the DSM-750 works with everything else also."

For more integration specifics beyond the bounds of this story, I should probably refer you to D-Link's forums.

Anonymous 02/06/2009 2:32 AM
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Does any of these media boxes support karaoke functions? And since there is no keyboard, it can't search for a song, right?

sorahl 02/06/2009 3:08 AM
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what i'm really needing is a MCE extender that also will view my dvd library (all legal) on my network, the way my MCE does directly connected to my main TV.

Anonymous 02/06/2009 7:28 AM
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Lame... The XboX 360 Arcade will do all of that, better, for $179... Why do they price these into the ubsurd? At least with the xbox, you get a dvd player and one hell of a gaming console!

Anonymous 02/06/2009 12:29 PM
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It is sad to see how few media players use the Audio industry approved standard loseles audio compression "Flac". Is this a licensing question or short sight?

jimcuk 02/07/2009 3:40 PM
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Ps3 does me fine its dnla certified and streams most of my stuff effortlessly from my qnap 209 pro.

also try looking at the Popcorn Hour A-110 it supports the most formats I have ever seen including MKV and will even stream iso files.
the Neuros OSD is also an interesting device

tomminator 02/08/2009 9:13 PM
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Speaking of games consoles, how does the Wii fare as network media player?

jbl775 02/09/2009 10:14 PM
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I have a dsm750 running over 100mbit against TVersity media server. Firmware version 1.02 supports MKV, but for some reason the audio does not playback properly....very, very, low sound.

Also, the HD playback does not work properly for me. It pauses/hiccups/stutters every 10 seconds or so...even when playing from USB or the DLink ML server. No joy from DLink support so far...."it works for us" is the reply. The unit works flawlessly for std def content. Have had a dsm320 for years and love it.

I would have hoped the 750 would not be giving me so many issues with HD content....

ppisarek 02/12/2009 10:00 PM
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The Wii works if you run your content from say TVersity to the Wii via the Wii Internet channel. The big issue is that it only supports DLNA and not uPnP. I actually purchased a copy of Nero Home media to use their player through DLNA and have run into a whole host of issues although on several forums in older versions it supposedly worked well.

The othe problem with the Wii through the net channel is the big row of icons on the bottom of the screen for navigation or whatever.

My take on it is, its do-able but not preferred if you have another choice.

Anonymous 02/13/2009 6:28 PM
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Look at the Popcorn Hour. It claims to play MKV video containers as well as the open standard loss-less audio format FLAC. The D-link looks like the usage / interface is the focus where the Popcorn Hour the focus in on the media formats and less on the interface.

jbl775 03/07/2009 1:40 PM
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Update: Got the HD playback working flawlessly now for MPEG and AVI. Appears to have been an encoding issue. MKV's still not working right though...

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