Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player Review

By Jeff Fila
June 28th, 2004

Summary

Gateway's ADC-320 Connected DVD Player can take almost any music, movie, or image file on your network and stream it to your TV and home theater. It can play almost any traditional optical media format available as well. The device, and its supporting software, is easy to set up and easy to use. With analog and digital outputs, and a progressive scan DVD player, your other components could be the weak link as your media will look and sound as good as the rest of your equipment can handle.

If you're planning on buying a progressive scan DVD player, you might want to look at the Gateway ADC-320 first. For only about $50 more than other DVD players, you can add the wired or wireless network connectivity and play all of the media files on your network.

What the ADC-320 needs, however, is a full-body makeover so that it will actually look as good as the image it outputs on your television. That, along with a few refinements and updates, will make this a device that Gateway's competitors will want to emulate.

Full Review

Introduction

In the quest to bring your digital music, videos and images from the computer and into your living room, quite a few companies have come up with some innovative solutions.

Gateway has taken a different approach to the networked media device than most of their competitors by integrating their unit with a progressive scan DVD player. The latest in this concept is the subject of this review, the Gateway Connected DVD Player with Wireless 802.11g Card (ADC-320).

The Connected DVD Player is just that — a DVD player that is connected to a network, and is able to play all of the video, audio, and image files on that network. Gateway sells both a wired and a wireless version of the Connected DVD player, with each retailing for $199.99.

The ADC-320 looks like a regular DVD player, but supports network playback of most media types.

Features and Design

The Gateway Connected DVD Player is a home theater component-sized unit finished in the familiar Gateway tan and gray. If the ADC-320 looks familiar, that may be because it is the same product as the GoVideo Networked DVD player, but with a different finish. If you like your home theater components black or silver, the ADC-320 won't match — in fact there's not much it will match with besides Gateway's own home-theater receiver.

Besides playing DVDs and CDs, the ADC-320 plays streaming digital movies, music and images from a PC on your network. Gateway's previous version of the Connected DVD player was well-received, but suffered from a lack of supported digital media formats. The ADC-320 addresses much of that by offering playback of many of today's most popular formats. Supported media types are as follows:

Optical Media:

DVD (Region 1)
Audio CD
Video CD (SVCD, VCD)
MP3 files on CD-R and CD-RW
Kodak Picture CD
VCD and DVD Karaoke discs

Streaming Content:

MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX, Xvid, AVI, DVR-MS video files
JPG/JPEG, BMP, PSD, PCT, TIFF image files
MP3 and WMA audio files

The front panel of the ADC-320 has all of the CD/DVD controls a regular optical disc player would have, and it has a few extra buttons to control the extra features. The ADC-320 comes with a 44-key infrared remote control, which most users will need since the front panel buttons are small and hard to read. Since the device has an on-screen display, the front panel has buttons to navigate through that display. One button not seen on other DVD players is the ‘Connect' button which allows you to connect or reconnect to your wired or wireless network. Also available on the front panel are two microphone inputs and a volume and echo control for those microphones.

With support for Dolby Digital decoding and output, the ADC-320 features all of the analog and digital audio and video outputs you may want. The rear panel features the following:

PC Card Slot — insert the included 802.11g PC Card adapter in here for a wireless connection to your network.Gateway also provides a wired model, in which a 10/100 Ethernet card would be inserted here.
5.1 channel RCA jacks — for analog 5.1 channel playback
2 channel RCA jacks — for stereo playback
Coaxial digital audio output
Optical digital audio output
Component video outputs
Composite video out
S-Video out

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.

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.

Usage and Testing

Every other networked media device we have tested, besides the two by Slim Devices, has suffered from the same annoying problem; remote control latency. Those products made it excruciatingly hard to change songs or albums because there was a several-second lag between when you hit the button on the remote and when the player actually responded. This we find unacceptable and the major flaw with most of these products. The way we see it is that you're effectively replacing a CD player — so the product really should work better/faster/simpler than a CD player to be worth it. We are glad to report that the Gateway ADC-320 did not suffer from this problem whatsoever. Changing from one track to another, even in a different album or folder was instantaneous — just like it should be.

Not only was latency a non-issue, but several other things that bothered us with some of the other players were not present either. The Connected DVD Player had no problem playing any DivX or Xvid movie we tried. We downloaded movie trailers and encoded our own DivX files and it played them perfectly. The TV shows recorded in Microsoft's Media Center played without a problem as did shows recorded with Snapstream's BeyondTV3. Every once in a while we had an issue with a high-quality recording skipping or not responding well to our pause, rewind or fast-forward commands with the remote control. However, these were very high-quality recordings that pushed the limits of the device — which were stated to be less than 3MBps. The DivX and Xvid recordings had no problem with these controls at all. We're still not at the point where super high quality video can be streamed wirelessly, but the quality is still certainly better than a VCR could ever be.

With your digital images, you can create slideshows and save them for repeated viewing. Like the others, the device can play music over your picture slideshows (or slideshows over your music). You can also load or create playlists from the media server application with ease. The Streaming Media Server allows you to edit the tags or attributes of your media files as well.

Navigation with the on-screen display was quick and intuitive. There was no wasted space (as was also an issue with us on competing products) and it just made sense. The navigation seemed to be well thought out and users with most any technical level should have no problem finding what they want. Gateway's documentation doesn't spend much time on the navigation, presumably because it is so easy. Everything can be controlled by the infrared remote, which is also well-laid out.

Playing DVDs and Optical Media

Besides being able to stream your digital content from your computer network, the ADC-320 is also a good old-fashioned DVD player. The progressive scan player looked and performed great with any media we tried. We coupled the Connected DVD Player with Gateway's KAS-303 home theater system (which we will also review soon) and it did a great job with audio CDs, photo CDs, CDs with MP3 files and DVDs. There was a lot to test on this product and we tried it all — including the entire box set of Band Of Brothers and all the Matrix movies. Audiophiles may be disappointed because it won't play SACD or DVD-Audio discs.

One thing that was a bit bothersome was that the unit really is two devices in one; a DVD player and a networked media player. This was quite evident when switching from one to the other, as it took a long time to open the DVD tray after switching from the connected player. It seemed like the player had to be shut down first, then the DVD had to start and then, finally, the tray would eject. This was our only issue with the DVD player.

A Few Refinements Needed

While the Gateway Connected DVD Player ADC-320 was one of the best networked media devices we've tested so far, it still could use a few refinements.

First, since it is connected to a network, which is usually connected to the Internet, it would be nice if the player could download CD track information from the Web. The on-screen display showing “Track 1, Track 2” etc just doesn't look right, especially when you're used to seeing complete ID3 tags from your digital audio files.

Secondly, the front panel display could provide some more data. All it really shows is song duration and the regular CD player information. One of our pet peeves with other networked media players is the fact that most of them force you to turn on the TV to listen to music because the interface is only through the TV. If the ADC-320 could utilize its display to show artist, folder, and song information it would make it much more useful.

Third, we mentioned this earlier but its worth saying again — the color scheme and overall design needs to be updated. The buttons on the front panel are too small and nearly impossible to read and the device just doesn't look at home in a modern home theater. While the ADC-320 may play every Flock of Seagulls and Corey Hart MP3 you own, it doesn't have to look like it was designed in the 80's.

And lastly, the ADC-320 could use a bit more support of media files. It's already an improvement over the previous version, but it would be great for it to have support for AAC files as well as SACD and DVD audio discs.

Conclusion

Specs

Highlights: - Multimedia streaming capabilities with enhanced 802.11g wireless - Enjoy all the photos, music, and videos on your PC in the comfort of any room in the house - Progressive Scan technology creates the best DVD picture quality - Listen to all your music and even your play lists on your home stereo - Share your photos and slideshows with friends and family on the living room TV - Watch home movies and MPEG video files stored on the PC on your TV - Windows Media Center Compatible! Enjoy your recorded TV shows from any room in the house. - Easy Setup using your TV and remote control Includes: - Connected DVD Player - RCA cables - PC software for easy setup - User guide - Remote with batteries * Range varies from approximately 165 to 1750 feet, depending upon multiple variables.

Specifications


	(separate Y and C signal output)	C: 0.286Vp-p 75ƒ\|
	Analog Out	1.85V(rms)/10kƒ\|ƒnRCA L/R pin jack
	Coaxial Out	0.5Vp-p 75ƒ\|; RCA pin jack (1)
	Component Video	Y: 1.0Vp-p 75
	Component Video Out (progressive/interlace scan modes)	Y: 1.0Vp-p 75 Cb: 0.7Vp-p 75 Cr: 0.7Vp-p 75
	Frequency response	20 Hz to 20 kHz
	Network Connection	Wireless 802.11g DVD Card (included)
	Optical Out	Optical fiber transmitter
	S-Video Out	Y: 1.0Vp-p 75ƒ\|ƒnsync, negative polarity
	Signal-to-noise ratio	90 dB
	Supported audio formats	WMA: >48 Kbps MP3: >80 Kbps
	Supported video and image formats	MPEG1: <3 Mbps MPEG2: <3 Mbps MPEG4: <3 Mbps JPEG/JPG: >25 Kbps
	Total harmonic distortion	Less than 0.05%
	Video Out	1.0Vp-p 75ƒ\|ƒnsync, negative polarity, RCA pin jack (1)

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