Digital Trends

Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player

June 28th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Setting up the ADC-320

Setting up the Gateway Connected DVD Player requires two steps — one to hook up the device and another to install the server software. While there's nothing terribly hard or confusing about it, it may take some time.

Hooking the DVD player up to your display and home-theater is as simple as any other DVD player installation. The only difference is that you will be plugging in an 802.11g network adapter in the PC card slot (or an Ethernet adapter if you have the wired version). Since this operates on a regular 802.11g network, the same factors you consider with wireless computer clients - such as distance from the access point and interference -  are also important here. Once the hardware is installed, it is on to the software.

Gateway's server software, called the “Gateway D5 Streaming Media Server,” will only work on Windows operating systems (98SE and later) so Mac or Linux users need not apply. Much like other wireless devices, it can be set up in ad-hoc mode (peer to peer) or on a network. Software installation is as straight-forward as the hardware installation. Just pop the CD in your Windows machine, install it, and search for media. This is the part that can be very time consuming. If you have a big list of files (would you buy this product if you didn't?) then it will take a very long time to scan.

We suggest you don't even bother with the default automatic scan and just do it manually once you have the software installed. The default scan will pick up any media — meaning even the smallest image you may have downloaded such as an avatar for a forum - you have on your hard drive and only seems to scan the C: drive and your My Documents folder. We had two separate hard drives on our test system labeled “Media” that contained over 80GB of movies, music and images — and the software failed to add them to our media collection on the initial scan.

A screen grab of the server software (click for a larger view).

Luckily, adding media to the server is as simple as browsing to a folder in the server application and selecting it for a scan. This also takes a while if you have a lot of media and if your system is a bit on the low side for the minimum recommended specifications. On our first test system with an AMD Athlon XP 2800 and 1GB of PC3500 DDR, it took 21:18.156 minutes for 12,357 media files (we know because the Streaming Media Center tells us this). But we were able to do other work while it was scanning. With another test machine, an Athlon XP 1700-based system with 512MB of DDR, the system was brought to its knees for a good ten, or more, minutes while looking for media and this was only for several hundred media files. Once the scan is done the application doesn't have much of an affect on the system at all but while it's crunching away, your system may be unresponsive. A lot of this can be attributed to the application creating a thumbnail image for each picture in your collection, but it also seemed to spend a lot of time reading MP3 and other audio files. You're not stuck with only the files on your hard drive as you can also have the software scan on removable drives (we used a 2.5-inch USB 2.0 hard drive), network drives and even flash memory cards — basically anything that Windows sees as a drive.