Linksys Kiss 1600 Review
So many of the big home networking companies are taking notice of the streaming media frenzy and are doing whatever they can to get into the game. Linksys has released a bunch of products over the past couple of years to try and establish themselves firmly in the space. We have reviewed a few of their products in the past,
here and
here, and for the most part have been impressed. They have never really blown us away with anything yet, but they are surely making an effort to make their name synonymous with media streaming.
The latest product we have found from them is the
Kiss 1600 Media Player. This is an upscaling DVD player that adds on media streaming as well as USB expansion. Those with fancy HDTVs that haven't yet jumped into the new HD/Blu ray DVD format will enjoy the upscaling feature of the 1600. It will push a standard DVD to look like HD. This is a nice bridge until you make the leap to Hi-Def DVDs.
The 1600 can also stream music from a computer on your home network. It works with any UPnP based server so you should be able to set it up fairly easily in your home network. Windows Media Player 11 comes with a UPnP server built in and there are plenty of great alternatives available for download like
TwonkyMedia and
TVersity.
There are a number of options for output which is oh so important on a device like this. Here is the list of outputs that it comes with:
- HDMI
- Component
- S-Video
- Composite
- SCART ( UK model )
- Coax and Digital Audio out
- RCA Audio out
The audio/video formats that it can handle are fairly limited which is too bad since so many of players out there support a ton of different formats. The 1600 supports
MP3, MPEG-4 and JPEG. So you basically have one file type per media type which is very strange. Sure they are the popular ones out there, but any device that forces us to handle our media their way makes us upset. We have TONS of media on our servers and it is in all kinds of different formats. The fact that we would need to convert a lot of it just to make it work with this player is a big negative in our book.
The review we have read basically says that while it does allow you to stream your media it is a fairly limited and flawed system. The interface is extremely minimal so things like thumbnails for images and videos don't exist and most curious is there is no way to fast forward or rewind through a video stream. So if you want to skip ahead a few chapters you might as well go make a sandwich and wait for it. Not sure why they didn't spend the time coming up with a way to seek in a video as this has been a basic function of digital video players since they were first released. The other critique they had was the remote that ships with it is rather confusing as all the buttons are the same color and roughly the same size so distinguishing one from the other isn't that easy. With so many of the nicer remotes you end up being able to use them in the dark without looking since the placement and shape of the buttons lends itself to being memorized. If they are all the same shape how could you know if you are hitting play or the number 0.
We have to agree with their conclusion that if you are in the market for an upscaling DVD player that has some basic media playback functionality this might be your device. If you are of the more discerning media streaming types you might want to pass on this one since it doesn't seem the media streaming aspect of the box is very well thought out. This is currently only available in the UK so we won't be getting one to test out, but if anyone reading has one please let us know what you think and if we are off base with any of our assessments.
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Posted by David Ficocello at November 17, 2007 2:39 PM
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