ASSESSING INTERGRATED VALUES
In the Summer issue of Digital TV & Sound, we took a look at Norcent’s
DP-220, one of a new breed of DVD players with DivX playback capabilities. To
save you the trouble of digging through your back issues, allow me to recap.
Downloading DivX-encoded video and burning it to a CD or DVD for use with this
sort of player sounds like a decent enough idea, but in practice ends up being a
lot more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention the fact that you are way more
likely to get a straightforward backrub at a massage parlor on the wrong side of
town than you are to find legitimate, legal content available through such
means.
At first blush, the AVeL LinkPlayer 2 (AVLP2) from I-O Data looks
like such a player. Its packaging proudly displays the DivX brand, along with
its handful of other video and audio formats, but the AVLP2 sets itself apart
with a few key features. For instance, high-definition video support and simple
plug-and-play networking—which means, of course, that all of that money you’re
saving by downloading movies instead of buying them won’t be wasted on blank CDs
and DVDs.
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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. |
To be fair, the AVLP2 carries an air of legitimacy that few other
PC-video players can claim. It also streams MPEG 1 and 2 video from a networked
PC or Mac, as well as its ace in the hole, Windows Media Video 9 content. But
before you get your hopes up for watching Terminator 2 in high definition
without fiddling with a Windows Media Center PC or crouching over a 19-inch
computer monitor, the AVeL LinkPlayer 2 doesn’t support the Digital Rights
Management (DRM) necessary to unlock the HD content on the few WMV9 DVDs on the
market, nor the majority of high-definition film trailers available for download
from Microsoft’s website.
This lack of DRM also precludes streaming playback
of any songs you might have purchased from iTunes (as if), despite the fact that
the player does handle the AAC audio format without a hitch.
To make matters
even worse, WMV9 playback is about as consistent as Lindsay Lohan’s weight, hair
color, and alleged coke habit. Of the handful of high-definition movie trailers
I found that would work without DRM, the AVLP2 played roughly half of them sans
audio until I connected the player to my receiver via stereo analog connections.
But if you can get past that, and don’t mind crashes so frequent they make
Windows Millennium Edition look stable by comparison, it’s actually fun and
quite easy to stream movie clips, video game previews, and—let’s be honest with
ourselves—the occasional thirty-second snippet of Secretaries Gone Wild from one
side of the house to the other.
