The player offers most standard connections, but uses a chintzy dongle to convert the Japanese-style D4 output to component video. A network connection allows the player to stream content from your PC, something it does better than playing DVDs.

Ironically enough, the player streams video better than it plays DVDs. When I attempt to play Little Britain: The Complete First Season the old-fashioned way, which is to say inserting the DVD into the AVLP2’s disc tray, I am met with skipping, stuttering video and sound that’s eerily reminiscent of watching broadband video on a dial-up connection. Just for kicks, I rip the disc to my computer and play the VOB file over the network with nary a problem—unless, of course, you consider a reset-inducing lockup in the middle of an episode to be a problem. The deeper you dig into the AVeL LinkPlayer 2, the more it begins to look like a scaled- down version of Windows Media Center without actually using Microsoft’s operating system.

Of course, you can’t load programs onto the AVLP2, and you can’t use it as a DVR, but you can attach external storage devices via USB, and the list of supported formats continues to grow with each passing firmware update. One recent download added RealPlayer’s Rhapsody music service to complement the player’s vTuner Internet Radio functionality, and if posts by I-O Data’s staff on the company’s official forums are any indication, its intentions for future upgrades are rather intriguing, including playback for TiVo’s proprietary video file format, and possibly even web browsing. Hopefully they will also add such basic amenities as DTS audio CD playback at some point in the future.

Of course, it’s impossible to review these potential future upgrades without a crystal ball, although given I-O Data’s failure to deliver on promised patches, like DRM support for WMV9 via DVD, a Magic 8-Ball might be more appropriate. So for now we’re left with a player that streams most major computer video formats, with the exception of QuickTime, and a whole host of audio types, but does not really excel at any of them. Truth be told, its only real advantages over Windows Media Center are price and ease of use, although the rather slothful response of its on-screen interface makes that last point moot.

It also doesn’t help that the AVLP2’s rather small and overly crowded remote seems to have been laid out by a sadistic contortionist who failed to abide by the First Commandment of remote control design: “Thou shall put thy Play button within reasonable reach of thy fast-forward and rewind controls.”

Video performance is also nothing to rejoice about. Although the image is generally smooth and mostly artifact-free—the handful of times I experience visual glitches, they’re generally huge and indicative of an upcoming crash or lockup—picture quality is exceptionally soft, not to mention prone to erratic overscan or underscan.

The softness could, of course, have something to do with the rather cheap, unshielded D4-to-component video dongle included with the player (it offers no dedicated RCA-type component output). Since the D4 output is rather uncommon in North America, I couldn’t pop down to Best Buy to buy a better one. However, the extent of the softness seems too severe to attribute entirely to a lackluster dongle.

In retrospect, it seems as if I’ve been a bit hard on the AVeL LinkPlayer 2. Its faults are many, but then again, so are its strengths. Said strengths, though, can be summed up quite easily: It takes audio and video from there and moves them to here, and has little competition in its price range.

If you are intrigued by the AVLP2’s features, it might be worth a look, but only after I-O Data works out all the kinks in the firmware.