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Buffalo’s Linktheater offers the promise of streaming music, video and photos around your home from your PCs to your TV, all packaged in a diminutive silver box.
The unit supports the standard formats you would expect, including jpeg for images, wmv, Mpeg1/2/4 and H.264 for video and mp3, wma and wav for music amongst others. And thankfully the Linktheater was easy to set up.
Media streamers sometimes come with a reputation of being stubborn beasts, but this was a breeze. It found our wireless network immediately, accepted the security key, connected and quickly told us which computers were on.
If you have security controls on your computer, you’ll need to pair the two, but traipsing from the living room to the office to allow them to talk was the sum total of effort we put into getting going.
The quality of your wireless network will have a direct affect on the quality of the stream, particularly when watching video. If you're suffering from poor signals, the unit can be hooked directly to your router via an Ethernet cable. Alternatively, you can plug media stored on a memory card or key directly into the Link Theater’s single USB port.
While this is a neat extra - and means you can easily play pictures, music or video directly without needing a PC – it’s also becoming fairly common now on such devices.
The Buffalo Linktheater also supports Intel’s Viiv digital home platform, although this is only available in some newer PCs.
The user interface was easy to use, but the device could sometimes be unresponsive when trying to scroll through folders. It also had an annoying habit of not listing some files in a folder, despite them being in the same format as others that were shown. Move the problem files to another folder though, and suddenly the Linktheater can see it.
We found that when watching films, you quickly forgot it was actually a stream from your PC to your TV. That is, until you tried to use the remote control to rewind or fast forward.
Video needs to be buffered, which makes fast forwarding or rewinding quite awkward. It leaps in chunks, making it hard to stop where you want. But this problem is not exclusive to the Linktheater; it happens on other media streamers too.
We also found it occasionally crashed, particularly when pausing – it became a game of chance, because all too often once paused, the video wouldn’t restart, which then meant we had to go through the process of fast forwarding to the place where we left off. And, unlike on personal video recorders such as a Sky+ box, that’s quite a slow process.
The device comes with software to organise your files, although it will work fine without it. Indeed, while the unit itself happily connects to a Vista PC, we found that the software would not. It also comes with composite and a ridiculously short Scart lead – any shorter and the device would have been hanging from the back of the TV. S-video is also supported.
While these were minor annoyances in what was an otherwise good product, the Buffalo Linktheater has little other than its support for Viiv to make it stand out from the crowd, offering much the same features, price and performance as alternatives on the market.
See also:
Another media streaming device that fails to up the ante 15 Feb 2007
Stream your video, music and photos with the minimum of fuss 05 Sep 2006
All Gadgets Tags: Media Streamer
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