Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windows.networking.wireless (
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Yes, Bill I have the 320.
It plays avi, mpg, mpeg2, vob, and wma video formats. The vob (DVD
format) works fine, but it can only play one vob at a time, rather
than stringing them together like a DVD is normally played.
The wireless g bandwidth has worked for me while watching video
provided I could get a 48Mb connection or better. As soon as my signal
dropped lower than 48Mbps the video became choppy.
The unit is great. My only complaint is the software that serves your
media. It is garbage.
First off, it doesn't run as a service but rather as a client on your
desktop. You can create a service yourself but they should have
provisioned this already.
Second, reading in mp3's is a nightmare. It tries to grab the ID3
information from each mp3. I have about 12,000 mp3's and it crashed
everytime I tried to scan in the files due to the amount of files it
tries to read in. I eventually went in and manipulated their SQLite
database to get this working properly. Again, there should be the
ability to turn this feature off at the client, but they've failed
again. You also can't queue up a bunch of songs. You can only play one
at a time. The only way around this is to create a playlist on your
server and then select that playlist on the 320. Again, not the end of
the world, but it would be nice to just hit play and have it shuffle
through my songs, playing them at random.
Third, it didn't read in the correct resolution of .vob files. For
instance, if a movie is a wide-screen, it just assumes that it's a
full-screen sized movie and squeezes the picture on to the screen
making it unwatchable. I would like to have control over this through
the software without having to manipulate their database everytime I
put a new movie on my server. One way around this is to just convert
all of your saved DVD formatted movies to mpeg. And like I had
mentioned before, I can only play one vob at a time meaning that to
watch a full-length movie, I would have to manually hit play on each
vob file during the movie (uaually 4 or 5 vob's in one movie).
It would be nice to see an open source project started to come up with
a better server piece for this device. All of the limitations are due
to faulty software. The device will play anything that your server
feeds it provided that the format can be decoded by the server.
Like I said the device works like a charm, but the software is
pathetic.
-Rob
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