Media streamers continue to grow in popularity and are fast becoming a must-have accessory for the modern home. D-Link manages to achieve something a little bit different with its DSM-330, teaming up with DivX to offer the world's first DivX Connected consumer device.

Exactly what extra benefits this will offer remains to be seen. On paper you'll find access to DivX services such as Stage6 - a YouTube-style video download service - and Funspot, which offers a number of interactive games available through your television. In addition you'll find more conventional streaming of video, audio and photos from your PC, and although none are provided as standard you can upgrade the feature-set with a range of community-generated plug-ins.

As always we're keen to see how the streamer looks and performs, but before you can get started you'll need to install the DivX Connected server software and connect either a wired or wireless network to provide access to content. There's not much to this small application and, despite a few initial glitches with access control, we had things up and running pretty quickly. If you wish you can set up multiple copies of the software on more than one computer, and choose which server to access from the TV, so larger households will benefit from specific user-oriented access.

The first big plus point we noticed with the DSM-330 is the interface. At the top level you can access various media content along with the services and plug-ins you have installed. When scrolling to the photo, music or video menu, you'll notice that a range of floating thumbnails appears on screen, generated from the photos, album art or video clips you have in each folder.

These randomise each time and, while more cosmetic than functional, we thought it was a great way to offer quick previews of collections. This is carried through into the individual menus, where you can browse either in a list view or thumbnail view, the latter improving accessibility and usability considerably.

As you'd expect, music and photos stream flawlessly, so we're going to focus on video content to test the unit's performance. Using the HDMI connection on the back you'll find support for HD content up to 720p resolutions, and there are Scart, composite and optical connections as well in case you're not HD-ready.

Standard definition content streamed admirably even on a wireless connection: it's fast and easy to browse clips and we didn't experience any lag in content buffering. High definition didn't fare quite as well, though, with glitches in playback likely to force you towards a wired connection if much of your content is encoded in these formats.

When testing out the Stage6 download service we experienced similar problems. Despite what appears to be a healthy buffer time, there was noticeable lag over a wireless connection and, although improved through a wired network, it's still not perfect.

Nobody has quite managed to nail real-time streaming from Web sites on one of these streamers yet, which is a shame; we were hoping for a better showing here from DivX's dedicated servers. Other minor issues include the lack of a visual volume control or any kind of time-related search for video, but you will find subtitle support and quick search filters for large collections using the numeric keypad.

We were very impressed by the interface and usability of the DSM-330, but a little let down by high definition streaming and the Stage6 video service. It'll be interesting to see what plug-ins are developed to increase functionality, and if the drawbacks highlighted above don't put you off, you'll probably be impressed by this versatile streamer.