Digital media is becoming an increasingly important format for entertainment. Everything from video and music to digital photos and Internet radio are rapidly moving into the mainstream, but there's still a reluctance to put an extra PC in the living room to play them, even if it has a small form-factor. Enter the Digital Media Player and specifically Pinnacle's ShowCenter 200.

This silver box, roughly the same size as a Freeview decoder, links to your main PC via wireless or Ethernet cable and transfers any of the content you have stored on that machine to play back on your domestic TV and your sitting room hi-fi. You control the box with a remote control and use the supplied software on your PC to organise the media that's available.

If you use a network cable between ShowCenter and PC, setup is straightforward, but most people will go for the wireless option and things are then a little more fiddly. You need to get the box to see either your home network or an ad hoc link to a PC, and then to discover and work with the media server software you've installed.

Under test, it took a while to get this right and was the kind of experience a non-technical person could find frustrating. We had to resort to Pinnacle's technical support, who revealed the company was still having trouble with the box working with wireless channels above 6. Since most routers default to channels 10 or 11, this could prove awkward.

Once we'd set our router to wireless channel 5, things went a lot more smoothly and we could then get into the ShowCenter's main menu system, which offers all the media we'd made available under Pinnacle's Media Manager software. This is a reasonably intuitive application, where you set up folders you want to monitor for new video, music or photo files.

Pinnacle has tried hard to make the ShowCenter 200 as compatible as possible, in both hardware and software terms. It has sockets for Scart, composite and RGB video and for SP/DIF and analogue audio, and even a USB port at the front, so you can connect a digital camera directly.

It supports most of the key formats for media, including MPEG 2 and DivX video, MP3 and WMA audio and most of the common graphics file types. There's also a predefined set of Internet radio channels which can be streamed directly from your PC, if it has a continuously connected Internet link, such as broadband or cable.

The actual display on your TV is well handled by the remote control and includes bells and whistles like track lists of any albums you play and the facility to zoom and pan on displayed photographs.

Pinnacle has tried to make a flexible and all-embracing Digital Media Player. The only obvious missing link is streamed TV, but even this is possible if you fit Pinnacle's TV tuner card in the serving PC. It's a workable solution if you want to play digital media but don't want a PC in your lounge.