Limitations doom HP's Digital Media Receiver frp, sjmn

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Limitations doom HP's Digital Media Receiver
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News

Hewlett-Packard's new Digital Media Receiver at $299 is a noble attempt to
create a new type of consumer product but delivers so little value that I'm
convinced we'll all look back in a year or two and marvel at how the company
had the courage to ship such a thing.

The DMR (www.hp.com/go/digitalmediareceiver) is one of the first entrants in
an emerging field I call ``home entertainment networking'' -- devices that
move music, pictures and ultimately video from a personal computer to
televisions and stereo systems elsewhere in the house.

There's an obvious need for home entertainment networking, as more and more
people assemble huge collections of digital pictures and songs on their PC's
hard drive. No one wants to listen to music only in front of a PC, or force
family and friends to gather around a computer monitor to look at snapshots
from last summer's vacation.

The problem is that it's not yet possible to make such a device easy to use,
versatile and inexpensive. You only get two out of three: easy to use and
inexpensive, but not versatile; or easy to use and versatile, but too
costly.

HP took the first route, opting for easy to use and inexpensive -- ending up
with a box that has significant limitations.

The DMR, which reached store shelves early this month and is also available
direct from HP (www.hpshopping.com), resembles a small cable-TV converter
and must be set up near a television set.

You also must have a home computer network to connect the DMR to your PC,
either a wired Ethernet network with cables or a wireless Wi-Fi network. The
DMR model en5000 with Ethernet only sells for $199, the model ew5000 with
Ethernet and Wi-Fi sells for $299.

Installation begins with the PC holding your digital music and photo
collection, which must be a newer machine running Windows Millennium Edition
or Windows XP. The first step is to install a piece of software called the
HP Digital Media Server as well as MusicMatch Jukebox, a popular digital
music player.

Then the three-pound DMR box is hooked to a television set, either through a
standard RCA video jack or an S-Video cable. Standard red and white audio
cables can be plugged into a TV or a stereo. The network connection is
either made by connecting an Ethernet cable to the box or wirelessly. The
final step is plugging in the AC adapter for power.

To make the DMR work, users go through a short set-up process by viewing
various options on the TV screen and making selections with a small
hand-held remote. The process is full of networking jargon -- you must know,
for example, whether your Wi-Fi connection uses infrastructure mode or ad
hoc mode -- but HP provides assistance in a 70-page instruction manual that
includes a glossary.

When all these tasks are completed, the TV screen displays a home page where
you choose between ``Music Jukebox'' and ``Photo Albums.'' Selecting Music
Jukebox takes you through a series of screens where you can sort through
your digital tunes by artist, album, track or genre. Selecting Photo Albums
shows the ``My Pictures'' folder on your computer's hard drive, where you
can pick individual images to display or run a slide show of all the images
within a sub-folder.

I set up the DMR at my house with a borrowed Gateway desktop computer
running Windows XP, and my home network using both Wi-Fi and a very long
Ethernet cable that I temporarily ran across the floor from my home office
to the family room.

Using the DMR, I was immediately struck by its limitations.

The computer always had to be running for me to hear music or view photos on
the family-room TV. I don't like leaving computers powered up at all times,
so I'd find it easier to burn my music collection and slide shows on CD
rather than using a device like the DMR.

Also, you can't listen to music on the DMR without plugging the unit into a
TV to see what you're doing. This means you can't use the DMR to move music
to rooms where you have a stereo but no television.

There's a longer list of less-crucial missing features.

The DMR, for example, can't move streaming Internet radio from your PC to
your stereo; the unit only plays music stored on your PC's hard drive. While
you can tell the DMR to print photos on your computer's printer, you can
only print at 4x6. And the interface can be confusing; there's no way, for
example, to change the music you're hearing during a slide show without
completely exiting from the slide show.

Finally, you can't create custom playlists of your music tracks or change
the order of slide shows from the DMR; you have to set up playlists and
arrange slide shows at your PC.

One other apparent glitch: The DMR had a hard time staying locked on my
wireless network, even though it was only about 20 feet from my wireless
base station in the next room. I lost the wireless connection several times.
One time, the microwave oven in the kitchen broke the connection --
something that doesn't happen when I'm using a computer in the same room.

In short, I can't recommend the HP Digital Media Receiver. But I'm hopeful
HP will quickly improve the DMR under intense competitive pressure; rivals
who promise to ship similar home entertainment networking products in the
next few months include Pioneer, Sonicblue, Sony, RCA and TiVo.

Someday, we'll all have home entertainment networks. That day just isn't
likely to come in 2003.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Mike Langberg at mike () langberg com or (408) 920-5084. Past columns
may be read at www.langberg.com.


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