How often you wanted to watch movie on TV that was stored on your PC? How did you solve the problem? Have you burned it on DVD and watched it on DVD player? Or have you watched it through TV-out on graphics card? Whatever you did, we are sure that at some point something bothered you, or the picture quality was really bad, or perhaps you just wanted simpler solution …

D-Link made an effort to provide you one more option through DSM 510 High Definition Media Player. This is not the first device from D-Link of that kind, but it’s the first one that we have tested.

First thing that we noticed is compactness and functional design of device. Bundle is consisted of remote controller, AC adapter and very short UTP cable.  Cable for video connection is also supplied and it’s up to you to choose SCART or Composite inputs.  What we missed in bundle was HDMI cable that you must purchase in case you have TV with HDMI connector. In case you have Home Surround System, connection with computer can be wireless with support for Wireless G protocol or it can be wired UTP network connection with speed up to 100Mbs.

For broadcasting video material in HD Video 1080i or 1080p quality wireless connection will be sufficient but for full HD quality broadcast you will need to set up wired network connection. USB port is placed on front panel and it can be used for connecting external storage from which media files can be played. Nero Home Center (installed from supplied CD) can be used for converting video material in format that is supported by DSM 510. If you don’t like for some reason Nero products you can use Windows Media Player 11 with Media Sharing option enabled. If your PC and DSM 510 are on same LAN network (and there is no reason for them not to be) it will be shown and it can play multimedia content from Windows Media Player Library.  Windows Media Player itself will detect active Media server and you can browse true available multimedia content.

Network settings are very extensive. You can set all parameters of network connection including MAC address filtering. DSM 510 supports wide range of multimedia files. It can play anything encoded with DivX codec, but also are supported MP3, WAV, WMA and many other formats. It doesn’t have support for some exotic formats: for example flac. Most popular picture formats are also supported.

Broadcasted material had pure and clear picture and sound. During our tests we didn’t encounter any problems except reproduction of movie subtitles. DSM 510 initially didn’t have support for movie subtitles so you should check what firmware is installed and upgrade to firmware version 1.06 or later. User interface is simple and it’s obvious that it was looked up to Windows Media Center interface. Everything is sorted under some criteria such as: artist, date, genre etc. Playlists are supported along with reproduction of internet streams. Remote control is functional and it was easy to get accustomed to it.

		Specifications     D - L i n k  D M S   5 1 0
		Standards	802.11g TCP/IP UPnP AV 1.0 USB 2.0
		Outputs	HDMI Composite Audio & Video Optical Audio 5.1
		Video Formats	MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, Xvid, DVR-MS, DivX
		Audio Formats	MP3, WMA, WAV, Ogg

Conclusion

Main question is: Do you need a device of this sort? We had a lot of fun with it during test period, but to achieve all its potentials some prerequisites need to be fulfilled. First, nice big TV screen, if possible with HDMI connector. Second, good surround sound system. Third, large amount of multimedia files stored on your PC or network storage. When all this prerequisites meet then you’ll get wireless access to your multimedia files stored on PC or network storage (or internet) that you can enjoy in while your PC can be dedicated to some other activities (heavy calculations of some sort – running Crysis for example).  Bottom line is: If you don’t have DVD player connected to you TV this is very elegant solution to that problem and it has wider range of applications.

Product HomePage

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)