daytona235's Full Review: Gateway Wireless Connected DVD Player
I bought the Gateway Connected DVD Player for $100 when it went on sale.
The unit looks not quite silver, but it will sit well with your other silver components it might even work well with any black components you might have. Physically its very slick its under 2 inches in height.
In addition to playing DVD's and CD's the unit is capable of playing Xvid, Divix, MP3's and photos on your PC via your A/V set up in your living room. You will need to keep your PC running and have the Gateway server software running on the PC to be able to access the media on your PC. You will of course need a home network, wired or wireless to use these features.
The DVD player functions well as a stand alone DVD player, that plays DVD's, DVD +R, CD, CD-RW, CDR and DVD+RW's. I have not tested with DVD-R. RITEK DVD+R and RIDATA DVD+R, RW's work fine with the unit. The unit has progressive scan 480p and displays DVD's very well on the TV.
Network connectivity. The device supports Wifi 802.11g with support for DHCP, 128bit WAP. The Wifi 802.11g card that ships with the product is 16bit and not the best card in the world. The unit does not support any 32 bit cards. I had problems with the WiFi connections not maintaining its connection to the server. So I moved to a wired connection. Now this could have been because of the location where I kept the device. I did not try moving the unit.
I decided to replace the wifi card with a wired PC card. Once hooked up via a Linksys EtherFast 10/100 Integrated PC Card, the connection problems went away and I was able to start using the product.
The Software, that comes with the unit is/was old and I downloaded the latest version from Gateway. The software runs on Windows XP, and Windows 2003 Server. The software is a bit buggy specially when dealing with photographs. In fact the application will hang and need to be restarted when dealing with some photo's (there is some evidence that this is related to images that are rotated).
The device does well with MP3's I tested with MP3's with various encoding rates from 128bit to 300+ VBR's and all play without any issues.
The video play back is not always predictable, some DiviX play some do not, some make the software need to be restarted on the PC.
The unit can also function as a Kareoke player and has two mic inputs in the front of the unit.
I use the device as a DVD player that can play MP3's and the odd video clip ever so often. And for this purpose at $100 I am happy with the unit.
Karaoke-capable DVD player with PC Card slot for wired or wireless access to a Windows-based home network Fully compatible with DVD, CD, VCD/SVCD, Kod...More at Amazon Marketplace
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.