D-Link DSM-510 High-Definition Media Player
DLink has released a smaller version of the DSM-520 to target the segment of the population that likes their media players small and out of the way. There is a great hands on review over at Small Net Builder that takes a detailed look at the new device.
What they found is that this device, while smaller and cheaper then its big brother the 520, lacks a lot of power and abilities as well. The 510 does all the basics one would assume in a networked media player, video, audio and images. The problem is that it seems to do them all just so so.
For video Dlink changed the way they decoded the video you stream to the box. Since it ships with a Nero based media server it relys on the PC serving the video to decode the stream rather then doing itself. A quote from the article:
Where the 520 relied on hardware to decode all of its supported formats, the 510 appeared to rely on the Nero server to transcode some formats. This means that your PC is responsible for a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to decoding video files.
One could argue that this is a good thing since you have a beefy computer just sitting there, why not put its CPU to work and help with your media streaming. The problem that they found seems to be with the Nero server itself. It seemed to have a problem with a bunch of file types and needed to have files encoded in a certain way for them to decode properly. Of course since the Nero server is a UPnP server you can use other servers to stream media for you. Since the 510 has no onboard decoding ability you have to rely on whatever server software you choose to do it for you and that can lead to problems.
For music the device performs fairly well. It can playback a bevy of formats and has a relatively nice display of the music as it plays, including album art if it is bundled properly. But like a lot of these multi-function media streamers its ability to browse your collection can often times become very slow.
On occasion, I found navigating a large selection of music files would get very slow, with remote response becoming very sluggish.
The 510 can do the standard slideshow/music playback gig and that is a nice feature to have. If you are going to bore your friends with your slideshow the least you can do is provide some music to listen to.
For photos some of the same problems exist. While it does the job fairly well it still is very slow accessing the server and displaying the photos.
The thumbnail display was nice, but I found it to be fairly slow, as the thumbnails seem to be generated on the fly, taking 15-20 seconds each time I entered a directory.
So while it does stream photos as advertised I'm not sure it is something people are going to want to put up with. One thing that often happens is that has you are scanning your collection you accidentally navigate to the wrong image folder. If you have to wait 15-20 seconds each time you do that you might end up throwing this little guy out the window.
So in conclusion it sounds like the streaming capabilities of this device are fairly limited. From what we have reviewed so far we have found a bunch of other media streamers that don't seem to have the limitations of the 510. While it can handle video, music, and photos it really can't do any of them very well. Whats that saying, 'Jack of all trades master of none'. That would seem to apply here.
Well we have reviewed a few products from DLink and so far they haven't really hit one out of the park, but they are still trying. They will surely learn valuable lessons from the release of the 510 and 520 and we can bet that they will have the 530 or 600 version out soon that hopefully will get more right.
We will be sure to keep you posted about any future releases in this line.
Read More in: Audio Streaming | Internet Radio | Video Streaming
Related Articles:
Came straight to this page? Visit Networking Audio Video for all the latest news.
Want to share this post with others? digg this and add to del.icio.us.
Posted by David Ficocello at June 4, 2007 9:00 AM
Newsletter
Subscribe - RSS
