When everything from your movie collection to your photo album is digital, why would you want to watch it all on a tiny monitor with tinny speakers while your big television and surround sound sits idle in the lounge room?
The simple solution is to put a computer in your lounge room, but not all of us can afford that luxury – especially if your significant other isn’t thrilled with the idea of a home theatre PC spoiling the decor. The trick is to hide all this cool functionality in an innocent-looking, socially acceptable device such as a DVD player. Sadly, walking into your local electrical discount store and throwing around terms like MPEG and DviX usually gets you that vacant stare that technophiles know all too well.
Kenwood’s DVF-N7080-S Network DVD player looks like a mild-mannered DVD player. A quick glance at the rear reveals all the outputs you’ve come to expect from a decent DVD player. Nestled in among them is the sexiest thing we’ve ever seen on the back of a DVD player; an Ethernet port.
Plug this DVD player into your home network, install the supplied software on a PC running Windows 2000 or XP, and all your photos, music and movies are at hand without getting off the couch. The player also has a PC Card slot for reading images from flash memory cards via an adaptor.
When you connect the DVD player to a network it automatically acquires an IP address, otherwise you can allocate one manually. Then it can search the network for PCs running Kenwood’s media library software. Sadly the media library software is a clunky and limited (not to mention ugly) version of Windows Explorer that insists you import files before they are accessible from the DVD player. It also insists you allocate every file a genre, another annoying step in the lengthy process.
You can’t just browse the contents of your hard drive from the DVD player. Nor can you set the software to monitor specified folders and automatically import new files. Even the ability to import a library from software such as Windows Media Player would be a good start.
ON SCREEN
Once you’ve been through the setup chore, the playback image quality is excellent.
Naturally this depends on the quality of the file – if, for arguments sake, you had a XviD of Star Trek Enterprise recorded from US digital television, it would look as if it was playing from a store-bought DVD. Sadly some of the DVD functionality isn’t available when playing computer files; the slow and step functions don’t work and you can only fast forward and rewind at eight speed, compared to 48 when watching a DVD.
There are also other quirky issues, such as the fact you can run a slideshow using images accessed over the network, but not from a disc or the PC Card slot. While the unit reads .jpg, .bmp, .gif and .png image files, only .jpg can be read using the PC Card slot.
It’s easy to nitpick at first generation products like this one, but really it’s a major breakthrough to see brand name AV manufacturers such as Kenwood embrace the digital entertainment revolution rather than fight tooth and nail against it. The unit is firmware upgradeable and new versions of the software are made available on the Kenwood website, so hopefully the features will improve over time.
As a stand alone unit this a decent all region DVD player, it even converts NTSC to PAL on the fly so you can watch Region 1 discs from the United States.
It will also play movies, music and photo files burned to CD-R/RW or DVD-R but only displays the first 21 characters of the file name on the television.
The unit is compatible with DivX.com’s Video on Demand service (vod.divx.com), another sign of Kenwood’s efforts to embrace new technologies. The service allows you to rent or buy secure DivX movies online over the internet.
To use this product it’s assumed that you already have a home network with an access point in the lounge room, but it’s fair to also assume if you have this kind of infrastructure you’ve already found a way to watch movies on your television. You can connect the unit directly to your PC using a cross-over cable, but taking the network out of the equation would seem to defeat the purpose of the exercise.
It’s also pricey, even considering all the extra features. While Kenwood is ahead of most AV manufacturers in releasing this kind of product, lesser known vendors such as Zensonic sell cheaper products with more features – including Mac and Linux support. ‘Mums and Dads’ will find the Kenwood software a cumbersome chore, while multimedia buffs can buy or build better solutions for less. If you fall somewhere in between, this DVD player could be the answer to accessing your growing digital library from the couch.