Linksys Dual Band WLS A/G Media Center Extender Bring your Windows Media Center PC's digital movies, live and recorded TV, pictures and music out into the living room! The Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A/G Media Center Extender lets you bring the digital entertainment available through and stored on your Windows Media Center PC to your Home Entertainment Center, without running cables through the house. Using a Wireless-A, Wireless-G, or wired Ethernet connection, the Media Center Extender displays home-made or downloaded digital movies and your digital photographs on the TV for the whole family to enjoy. And your digital music collection is finally freed from those little computer speakers and can play in full glory through your stereo system. You can also watch and pause live TV shows, or record them digitally for later viewing. Finding something to watch is easy with the free on-screen program guide. The Media Center Extender sits by your home stereo and television and connects to them using standard consumer electronics cables. Then it connects to your home network by Wireless-A or Wireless-G networking, or if you prefer, it can be connected via standard 10/100 Ethernet cabling. Using the included remote control and the user-friendly menus on your TV, you can quickly find the digital movies, TV shows, pictures or music on your Windows Media Center PC. You can even chat with friends through Microsoft Windows Messenger while watching movies on the same screen. Let
1 Disappointed !!!
If you are buying this thing to stream video from your PC to another location, please read this!!!!!
First, the Media Center Extender does not support many common movie or video formats such as .Avi, DivX, Xvid or .Vob. The only supported formats are MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or WMV (standard definition only, not high def). In addition, it will not work if these videos have AC3 or Dolby Digital Audio, only 2 channel audio works. See details from the Microsoft Website below:
Video file formats supported:
* Windows Media Video 9 main profile
* WMA Standard audio
* Max resolution 720x480
* Max bit-rate 4Mbps
* WMV content may be Windows Media DRM-protected
* MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standard definition
* MPEG-1 layers I and II audio
So, if you have a big video library on your hard drive, you may not be able to watch them with your Media Center Extender without first transcoding them to a supported format.
Second, you cannot put a DVD in your PC and play it on your Media Center Extender. You would need to rip it to your hard drive (in one of the few supported formats above) before you can play it.
If you want to watch video in another room, I suggest you go out and buy a cheap (about $50-$70) DVD player that will support most of the common video formats.
Okay, now for what the Media Center Extender did well.
Photos- were easy to navigate and had several settings for displaying your pictures.
Music- streamed my play list with good quality sound.
The Live and Recorded TV options worked well but HDTV is not supported.
2 Beat Expectations
This macine operates much better than I thought it would. Set up is pretty simple. I was expexting it to be an ordeal, but it was done in only a few minutes.
For best results on streaming video or TV content, run it on the dual band A/G wireless router. The a-network runs video very well. 802.11b is not really sufficient.
It can't stream protected video content and that's my only complaint. It seems like there could be license mgt to allow this rather than just deny it completely.
3 Good idea, but useless in my case.
This Product is a great idea, but I never got it working right. Im living in Europe and this product does only support NTSC, so this product is not useable in Europe. If you live in a concrete house, you might have to use Wired-Ethernet-connection between your extender and your computer, because when using Wireless connection, the extender has to be nearly on top of the router to get all the wireless connection it needs.
In the user-manual it says that the extender can operate @ 100-240V but the technical support doesn't believe you can use 240V.
And for those who don't know: MS Media Center 2005 does not support DivX.
So in my case, this product is not worth it, but I give it 2 stars for the idea.
4 Great Idea - Still Some Features Missing
First, if your going to buy a Media Center Extender, you do need to have a Media Center PC running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 to extend! This obviously eludes some of us.
Please review Microsofts website MCE area for info on MCE PCs and detailed specs for the extender.
Observations:
1. 480i output via Composite, S-Video or Component jacks. No Enhanced TV 480p nor HDTV 1080i or 720p at this time. Not sure that a software only update could fix this.
2. Recommend Wired connection for both the MCE PC and Extender connected via a switch not a hub. You can do a/g wireless, but video over wireless is tough trick and will need to be tuned for good signal strengths.
3. Audio - Great playback via the extender. Provides ability to play recorded music in a number of formats.
3. Video - Over a wired connection it is great. You can watch TV via the TV tuner or recorded shows saved to the MCE PC hard drive. You can also play videos and view slideshows of pictures. Playback of pictures is limited at this time. Most likely you be reduced to using JPG and other lesser formats. Not support for RAW camera files or Adobe's Digital Negative Format (DNG) yet. Unfortunately there is limited choices for video as well. You'll really need to have your video files in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 or Windows Media Format.
3. While it doesn't make sence to extend the "Play DVD" function since the DVD drive is somewhere else, they could have included a local DVD drive in the unit and this precludes playing DVD content ripped to your hard drive.
All in All this is a great idea and executed pretty well. The whole concept of the MCE PC is still young and functionality is being defined and the Extenders are limited by that changing functionality. One concern is that the extender won't/can't be upgraded to work with MCE 2006 when it is released.
5 Good first effort but has problems
I have the Linksys Media Extender and overall I like it, but it has some problems which folks should be aware of. First I am running this with a Dell with Windows Media Edition 2005 (older versions aren't supported) and a Linksys dual A/G wireless router. The reason to use a dual band router is so that you can keep your general computer use on the G band and dedicate A to the extender. This works pretty well as long as you have the source computer fairly close since the range of A isn't as good as G. For my setup the A router is about 30 feet away with 2 walls and I am getting enough bandwidth to watch video OK.
Here are the pros:
- it is really great to have all your photos available on your TV and accessible via a remote control
- same for music. I now have a jukebox that can access my entire CD catalog since I have converted it to MP3 format and they are on my Dell
- also good to have access to home movies that I've converted to windows media format
Here are the cons:
- for TV viewing, I have Comcast analog cable hooked up to my dell and for some reason low channels (e.g. 2,4 5, etc) look visibly degraded. There is no problem with higher cable channels (e.g. 40, 50, etc). This really isn't a problem for me since I watch TV via a Tivo that I have next to my TV, but anyone that wants to watch TV via the extender should be aware of this.
- the extender has crashed/frozen several times forcing me to do a hard reboot of the box. This is somewhat time consuming because you have to reenter the WiFi network setting again.
- you can delete files and even directories from the remote control on your PC hard drive! I would expect this for recorded TV shows, but you can also do it for pictures, home movies, and even files in My Documents (if the directory is listed in the Exteder as having media files in it). There are probably some things you can do on the Dell to prevent this, but out of the box it is set up to do this. This can be a problem if someone who might accidentally delete content has access to the remote.
So overall I really like the extender and I think this is the future for how people will access digital content on their TVs. But as many new cutting edge products, there are some rough spots and patience is required to deal with them.
6 Needs XP Media Edition 2005
This product will not work with any other OS except Windows XP Media Edition 2005. It won't even work with Windows XP Pro SP2 with the Media Connect patch. I'm taking it back.
7 Good execution on great vision
I really like this product. I really like Media Center 2005. But more than anything else, I LOVE the IDEA of this product -- a networked device that helps unite the living room to the home office, giving you one place to put your pictures, videos, and music. This is a great generation one product. I can't wait to see what the next couple of generations bring.
That said, here are the things to be aware of when purchasing:
1) You need to know (or find someone to help you who knows) the basic fundamentals of home networking and Windows. This is not a completely plug and play installation.
2) You must have a very strong network connection between your Media Center 2005 device and your Media Center Extender. Ideally, you would have a wired connection (i.e., using old fashion cables). But I use the Wireless-G option and it works great now -- but I had to spend a good deal of time tuning the placement of my wireless router to ensure optimal connectivity between PC and Extender.
3) Be aware: TV content labeled as Copy Protected will not play on the Media Center Extender. For me, this means one very bad thing -- I can't watch 99% of the shows on HBO on the Extender. This is very disappointing for our family, because we enjoy HBO and actually use the Extender on our main TV in the house (with the Media Center 2005 PC in our home office). Pay TV channels are the only area we have had problems with this, though, so if you don't need to watch these channels on the TV where you are putting the extender, don't worry about it.
4) There are a few other things you can do on the Media Center PC that you can't do on the extender. Mainly for me--the extender can't play content on your Media Center PC DVD drive (I get around this by first burning the DVD to my hard-drive using a product called Pocket DVD -- a perfect solution to put my son's frequently watched kid movies in a place that's easily accessible).
Overall, if you already have Media Center 2005 -- buy this product--it's really cool to have a central hub for all this content with multiple TVs hanging off it.
If you don't already have Media Center 2005, and are considering it -- I recommend it. But be forewarned that it's still what I would call an "early adopter" solution. Be prepared for a few stumbles and bumps -- but it's sure to wow your techie buddies.
