Reviews
Y
ou’ve heard the promise of the media server, haven’t you?
A PC squirreled away in some discreet location that’s dedi-
cated to storing every CD, DVD, and image you own on its
massive hard drives, and from which you stream all your content to any
(or every) TV in your home courtesy of an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network. Sounds
great, but up ‘til now, the streaming boxes available to facilitate the process
have had limited video playback capabilities. Well, that’s no longer the case.
Pinnacle’s new ShowCenter is one of a new-generation of streaming
boxes that offer support for all the major video codecs—including DivX and
other MPEG-4-based formats. Unfortunately, the product suffers from a few
first-gen issues that mar an otherwise kick-ass product.
When you initially set up the ShowCenter software, it prompts you to
search for media files. Conveniently, we had all our digital photos, ripped
DVDs, and MP3 files stored on a single hard drive, so the server software
needed to search just that drive. After the three hours it took to chew
through our 1,500 digital photos, 25,000 MP3s, and handful of ripped DVDs,
we were able to fire up the ShowCenter.
Movie playback kicks ass. The image quality of our ripped DVDs was
indistinguishable from what you’d get with a midrange DVD player, complete
with 5.1 sound and flawless images. Music playback is acceptable. It’s easy
to play entire selections from an artist or a particular album, but you can’t
easily browse album titles from within the artist category.
The photo feature is a problem. Even if you have just a single image in a
folder—say, the album art that accompanies a collection of MP3 files—the
ShowCenter’s software will create a separate photo album for that oneimage. And there’s no way to prevent this from happening. With 3,000
albums in our music collection, each with a piece of art, you can imagine
the hell that is our photo album inventory. Our real photo albums are buried
amidst thousands of albums holding nothing more than CD cover art.
Our main gripe with the ShowCenter is the subpar server software
it comes bundled with. It’s slow and unwieldy when dealing with even
moderate-size media collections, and proved incredibly frustrating at
times.
Our other gripe is that
the ShowCenter’s remote is
uncomfortable and difficult
to use. The buttons you’ll
use most frequently are hid-
den at the bottom of the unit,
and the buttons you’ll rarely
need are in close proximity to
your thumb.
—WILL SMITHMP3WMA
An uncomfortable remote, ill-conceived server soft-
ware, and flawed photo browsing.
$300, http://www.pinnaclesys.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 7
If you want to stream movies to your living room,
this player will do the job.E
verybody knows that no matter what you do, the first pancake off the
grill is going to be the worst of the stack. But as long as you’re a halfway
decent cook the rest will be fine. That’s a gentle metaphor for Lite-On’s
first dual-layer DVD burner. It’s not outrageously slow, but it definitely falls
behind the curve of what we’ve come to expect from the company.
Dual-layer burners write at 2.4x speed to DVD+R media, and here the Lite-
On does fine, taking 44:24 (min:sec) to burn our test disc—which is almost 30
seconds faster than the Sony DRU-700A dual-layer DVD burner we reviewed
in August. This isn’t a significant advantage, but we noted that after we initi-
ated the burn, it took 38 seconds for the drive’s laser to begin firing, and nearly
a minute to write the lead-out necessary to “close” the burning session. This
suggests that Lite-On may be able to considerably shorten dual-layer burning
with some firmware work. (Like Plextor, Lite-On is very diligent about tweaking
firmware—even for older drives—and posting regular updates.)
Lite-On should also pick up the pace of burning to single-layer media. The
drive wrote 4.25GB
of data to an 8x
DVD+R disc in 10:11,
about a minute
longer than Sony’s
drive. DVD-R didn’t
fare any better at
10:41. Rewriteable
formats were a little
faster; the fastest
was DVD+RW,clocking in at 13:56 to burn a full DVD.
Sadly, unlike other drives, Lite-On’s SOHW-832S isn’t able to burn at veloci-
ties above the disc’s officially rated speed, and our test dual-layer DVD-Video
demonstrated less compatibility with set-top players than Sony’s drive (work-
ing in three out of five players
compared with Sony’s four).
But at least buyers receive
Ahead’s Nero Express 6 suite
with the drive; if you buy one,
we highly recommend scooting
over to the company’s web site
after you install the software to
download the free upgrades.
—LOGAN DECKERSignificantly less expensive than other dual-layer
burners.E-Z BAKE OVENDUTCH OVEN
Significantly slower than other dual-layer burners.
$180, http://www.liteonamericas.comMA XIMUMPCVERDICT 7
80 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2004
verybody knows that no matter what you do, the first pancake off the
grill is going to be the worst of the stack. But as long as you’re a halfway
decent cook the rest will be fine. That’s a gentle metaphor for Lite-On’s
first dual-layer DVD burner. It’s not outrageously slow, but it definitely fallsDual-layer burners write at 2.4x speed to DVD+R media, and here the Lite-
On does fine, taking 44:24 (min:sec) to burn our test disc—which is almost 30
seconds faster than the Sony DRU-700A dual-layer DVD burner we reviewed
in August. This isn’t a significant advantage, but we noted that after we initi-
ated the burn, it took 38 seconds for the drive’s laser to begin firing, and nearly
a minute to write the lead-out necessary to “close” the burning session. This
suggests that Lite-On may be able to considerably shorten dual-layer burning
with some firmware work. (Like Plextor, Lite-On is very diligent about tweaking clocking in at 13:56 to burn a full DVD.The 832S gets
a collective shoulder-shrug
for its slower-than-expected speeds, but knowing Lite-On, a
speed-improving firmware update is right around the corner.Ahead Nero Express 6
Ahead Nero Vision Express
Ahead Nero BackItUp
Ahead Nero ShowtimeTHE BUNDLE Writes to:
DVD+R DL 2.4x
DVD+R SL 8x
DVD-R 8x
CD-R 40x
Rewrites to:
DVD+RW 4x
DVD-RW 4x
CD-RW 24x
Reads:
DVD-ROM 12x
CD-ROM 40xLite-On SOHW-832S Dual-Layer DVD Burner
Oof! Lite-On stumbles at the gate, but may still take the lead
BENCHMARKS DVD CD
Av erage data transfer (MB/sec) 8.1 4.6
Random/full-stroke seek (ms) 106/190 110/221
Audio extraction (min:sec) – 2:48
Data DVD/CD burn (min:sec) 10:11 (DVD+R) 3:13
CPU utilization 16% (2x) 8% (8x)
*The data CD burn test uses the bundled applications to create a 700MB
CD-R. The data DVD burn test uses the bundled applications to create a
4.25GB. The audio-extraction test uses a commercially stamped 74 min-
ute audio CD. All tests were performed using Verbatim media.A little nip ‘n’ tuck
to the server software, and Pinnacle’s
ShowCenter could be an irresistible product.Pinnacle ShowCenter
This streaming box makes it harder than it
should be