Networking company D-Link has come up with a networked product that crosses over from the world of wireless networking into the Audio Visual arena. The DSM-320 Wireless Media Player is such an unusual product that D-Link has created a section on its website called Digital Home which contains just this single product.

The unit is 426mm wide, 285mm deep and 43mm high, and it connects to your TV using one of three ports on the back. There are coaxial composite video, S-Video and SCART ports, and D-Link supplies cables for the last two options. There are also three options for connecting the audio outputs in the shape of a pair of RCA connections, optical digital and coaxial digital, although D-Link doesn't supply any audio cables.

If you use the SCART cable to connect to your TV it handles both audio and video, but if you want to use surround sound a dedicated audio link will be necessary to hook up your hi-fi or your home cinema speakers.

Next you install D-Link's Media Server software on your PC (running Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP), and when that's done you select the directories on your PC that you want to share with the DSM-320, much like any other networked connection. Finally you connect the DSM-320 to your PC. You could use the supplied CAT5 Ethernet cable, but that would rather defeat the point of this device, so it's far better to use 802.11g wireless, which of course necessitates a suitable wireless access point or router.

Once that little lot is sorted out, you're ready to sit back in your armchair, pick up the remote control and watch the movies and music that you have stored on your PC. Your instinct may be that you could achieve the same end by using the TV-Out port on your graphics card to connect your PC to your TV, but you'd be wrong. The DSM-320 doesn't use your PC to play the media that you choose, but instead uses it as a server or networked hard drive that holds the media.

This means that you can watch a movie in Windows Media Player on your PC while a member of your family watches a different movie that is also stored on your PC. In essence we're heading towards the Utopia where all of our digital content is stored on a single central hard drive, which we once heard Seagate refer to as a Media Tank. Although this is a very strong feature for the DSM-320, it is also a weakness.

Updates for the firmware and software are handled automatically through the network connection and onward to the Internet. You have no way of installing extra codecs, so the DSM-320 can only play back the formats that D-Link supports. The list is quite long and includes MPEG, XVID, AVI, MP3, WMA, JPEG, BMP and TIFF, but not AAC or DivX. Furthermore, the screen sizes tend to get messed up such that you lose a vertical strip off each side of the movie that you're watching.

It's great fun to watch a slide show of your digital photos on your TV, instead of on your PC monitor, but the low refresh rate of a TV adds an annoying flicker that you don't get on a monitor.

While we're finding fault, you'll spend ages tracking down the movie, song or photo that you want if your media isn't arranged in logical directories. If you do have your media organized you'll find that the D-Link menu system is very frustrating as it only shows a handful of items on the screen, so if you're scrolling through music it can literally take a quarter of an hour to find the artist that you want; the menu system is quite slow.

D-Link has broken new ground with the DSM-320, and while it's not perfect we feel that most of the faults could be corrected with firmware updates over the coming months. If you own 802.11g hardware and want to stream media from your PC to your TV then this is a promising product indeed.