ZyXel DMA-1000 Digital Media Theater

Another contender in the complete streaming digital home theater is the DMA-1000 from ZyXel. It carries all the appropriate buzz words to land it in the same category with the likes of AppleTV, Mvix760HD and the Netgear EVA-8000, but after reading through their website and looking at a few reviews it seems that the people at ZyXel just whipped something together without a lot of thought and in the end aren't in the same league with those big boys.

So right off the bat the unit does not come with WiFi. This is a huge strike against it since most people don't have a network connection by their entertainment center. Strike two comes when we found out that it doesn't play DivX files. While this would seem a minor annoyance to some, we find it as a sign of a poor product. The popularity of the DivX encoder has been well established for many years so we are curious as to why they didn't add support for it.

Lets look at what it can do shall we:

Video

• MMV9
• Xvid
• AVI
• MPEG 1/2/4

Audio

• MP3
• MWA
• WAV
• AAC ( unprotected )

Image

• JPEG
• BMP
• PNG
• TIFF
• GIF

And for output:

Video

• HDMI ( 1080i )
• S-Video

Audio

• RCA Analog Stereo
• Digital Coax

It would seem by looking at the specs that they have covered the necessary formats to be considered a good product, but as always it's in the implantation where we find out what it's made of. From the reviews we have read it seems that they did only marginal jobs on both video playback and audio playback and apparently they forgot that the remote is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle( strike three ). It is your users gateway to your product. If you don't put any thought into it you will frustrate your users and in the end lose you business.

So to be honest I can see us even wanting to get one of these in the office to try out. Looks like we will just let this one pass us by. If anyone has actually used it and wants to convince us that we are making a mistake please drop us a line and let us know.

Read More in: Audio Streaming | Image Streaming | Video Streaming

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Posted by David Ficocello at August 7, 2007 9:00 AM