Buffalo LinkTheater review

Making the LinkTheater work with your network can be a challenge, depending on your level of experience. Wired connectivity offers faster speeds and more reliability, but as wireless is so much sexier, we decided to start there. Connecting up to our office network might not be a real-world situation, but we thought it would be cool to see it in action with access to so many different computers. It proved about as much fun as being trapped in a small cage with the world's deadliest animals. When we finally connected to the wireless network, it was a genuine accident.

We decided to upgrade the machine's firmware before testing anything else, and sure enough the box found an update online and proceeded to download it. Helpfully, the update wiped all the settings that we'd carefully spent the last half an hour researching and entering -- including a 14-digit wireless network key that had to be typed out using a mobile phone-style input system, like text messaging before predictive text arrived. It was an act of physical endurance and patience that only competitors in the world domino rally championship could possibly relate to.

We suspect that the target audience for the LinkTheater will forgive it for such foibles, and to be honest we did, once it was all set up correctly. After all, anyone who will pay the premium for this player is likely to have a modicum of technological knowledge. Heck, if that's you, you might even enjoy all this tinkering, especially once you see how comprehensive the system is in full swing. The menu system isn't good looking, but anyone used to Microsoft Windows will be able to pick it up. It's confusing because the same rules of navigation for DVD don't apply to DivX files -- pressing the Menu button during playback does nothing, so instead you have to press stop and lose your place in the film.

The LinkTheater's video upscaling capability will be the feature that will attract most cooing from the AV sect. For anyone who missed our Denon DVD-2910 review, upscaling is a premium feature that's been introduced to help shorten the gap between the low-resolution DVD format (576 horizontal lines of resolution) and HD flat-screen TVs (720 horizontal lines or above). We wouldn't compare the LinkTheater to the Denon DVD-2910 on picture quality, but there is a big jump in quality when you use upscaling. There would have been an even bigger jump had Buffalo included HDMI or DVI digital video out, but this might be one wish too far. The AV hardcore will be apoplectic at the news of no DTS support on the player, which is even more unbelievable than the lack of Scart output.

So, despite some ups and downs, we were impressed with the LinkTheater. However, there's obviously still room for improvement. It would have been nice to see a hard drive -- a similar device from KiSS has an 80GB drive for recording television and you can even send the recorded programmes to your computer for editing. The absence of a hard drive means the LinkTheater is cheaper, but also prevents it from ticking all the boxes on the geek wish list.

Performance
The LinkTheater will output in either 720p or 1080i resolution, matching the resolution of your flat screen and interpolating the video stream to fit. If you're watching a DivX HD clip, the results are very good, and standard DVDs are serviceable as well. It's a shame that there are only four DivX HD clips available on the site at the time of writing, and it doesn't look like it will become a major force in HD technology in the way that MPEG4 and Windows Media Video 9 have. It's one of the few ways to see HD in action though, way ahead of Blu-ray and Sky HD in 2006.

When you're upscaling video and using the component outputs, low resolution DivX content looks good too. We converted a DVD of comedy cartoon classic Family Guy in Dr. DivX with a horizontal resolution of 384 lines, and it was very detailed, considering the compression. Audio performance was also good, but the lack of DTS support is fatal.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide