Well, I bought a Christmas present for myself. Connected DVD Player from Gateway. Finally, I thought I would be able to play some of the those mpg's I have laying around from the PVR I bought for my computer over a year ago. It's OK watching them on the computer occasionally, but it had gotten to the point that I wouldn't even watch them, because it was more comfortable to sit on the couch and watch a movie in the comfort of my living room.
Couple things about the DVD Player you should know before I go into this… I had extremely high expectations for a 1.0 release. With that said, I had read a number of reviews that gave it pretty solid backing as a must have component.
However, the MPG support didn't work for the MPG files I had PVR'd… needless to say it went back to the local Gateway Country store. That was the whole reason for buying it in the first place. Looks like I am going to have to roll my own (looks like the
Shuttle would work out pretty well). Let me point out I am not saying it wouldn't play any MPG, it just doesn't play high quality mpg's. Now granted, I was running it on the wireless option, and I was latter told at the store the wired option supported better quality (why wasn't this in the documentation). Which I have some skepticism, as I had actually went into the data store for the media files and modified entries in the media library that allowed the mpg to be played. The reason that I had to do that is because the file could not be imported by the Media import application that came with the player. The data store is actually an Access data base in the root directory of the application. I just went in, looked around the tables and modified the appropriate flags to make the Connected DVD player think it was a valid file. When I tired to play the high quality mpg, it played the first 5 seconds of the movie, before it became digitized and froze up. Almost like the processor couldn't handle it.
The other thing that was really frustrating is that when I bought it at the Gateway Country Store the sales people were not extremely knowledgeable about the product. For example, they didn't know that in the latest packaging it didn't come with a PCMCIA network card like it had in the past… that caused an additional irritating trip back to purchase a compatible card. They also didn't know that it supported MPG4 through a software and flash upgrade found on the Gateway site.