Something worth looking into… at Daniel Spisak on Technology

Recently I was reminded of a very awesome DVD and computer video player device that I ran across when at the 2006 CES show in Las Vegas. Turns out, this device might actually be able to be the replacement successor to my D-Link DSM-320 media players that I currently use.

D-Link DSM-320

For those who don’t know what I am talking about allow me to explain. Basically, I don’t watch live television anymore. I don’t even TiVo it anymore due to the fact that living with my parents means I have to deal with their Dish Network subscription and I’d have to get a standalone Series 2 TiVo to control a Disk Network sat reciever and I just dont want to deal with it. So how do I watch my shows that I am interested in?

Throught BitTorrent! How is that you ask? Well it is slightly complicated, but in essence how it works is I go to two main sites Mininova.org and EZTV @ Efnet where I download my torrents using my favorite client, uTorrent, which rocks if you haven’t tried it yet. It totaly blows away the offical client as well as Azeurus and ABC. After a few hours I have my TV shows downloaded and indexed automatically by the D-Links server application that runs on my desktop PC. At this point I now have my TV shows, editied to have no commercials and encoded in the XviD codec ready to watch. To D-Link application then streams the file over my 100Mbit Ethernet network to the DSM-320 which then outputs to the home theater setup and into my speakers and 27″ TV via S-Video. For the most part it works pretty well.

So whats the problem then? Codecs. The DSM-320 doesn’t support DivX which is odd considering it supports XviD. The device also doesn’t play Windows Media Video at all whatsoever which is annoying. D-Link has a newer unit to supplant the DSM-320 however, the DSM-520 which adds support for WMV which is great and even has HDMI output which is great it you’ve got an HDTV or A/V reciever that supports that, which I don’t. But the newer unit doesnt support DivX still! What the hell?

So the potential solution to this problem is this guy:

The AVeL LinkPlayer2 2006 Edition DVD/Media Player which can be had for only $249 which is a steal when you consider that this thing plays DVDs, and has a swiss army knife of audio and video codecs it handles:
Video:
MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MPEG2-TS/MPEG-4/DivX®/XviD/WMV9
Audio:
MP3/MP2/AAC/WMA1/WMA2/WMAPro/PCM/Ogg Vorbis/WAV
Photo:
JPEG/BMP/GIF/PNG
It’s got support for Windows, Mac AND a beta for Linux for the host application! It’s got a good array of outputs and it looks to be pretty darn versitile. Best of all, you can get the sucker for just $249!