Video Everywhere?
Next I tried watching Lost in Translation on a second PC over a wireless network, but the Windows Media Player software flashed an error message and I couldn't play the movie--DRM at work again.
After that, I wanted to try watching Lost in Translation on my 36-inch Sony WEGA television. A new class of adapters is supposed to make this possible, using 802.11g signals to stream video, audio, and images wirelessly from PC hard drives for playback on TVs and stereos. Alas, the adapters were not available in time for me to test. However, network equipment makers Netgear and D-Link say that their new adapters should be on sale by the time you read this.
Enter Gateway, with its nifty $200 Connected DVD ADC320 Player. The unit looks and acts a lot like a standard DVD player, but it has exceptional network smarts. A PC Card slot in the back of the chassis accepts an 802.11g network card, enabling the Connected DVD Player to hop onto your wireless network to find and play digital media.
Would it work? I plugged the Gateway-supplied Wi-Fi card into the Connected DVD Player, and the unit failed to see my network. I searched for firmware upgrades on the Web. I turned WEP security off, then on, then off again. I even tried a different PC Card and router. After a couple of hours on the horn with Gateway's techs, I received a second Gateway PC Card (which didn't work) and a Gateway 802.11g router (which did).
Thanks to the new Gateway router, I finally got the player working with my network. Using the player's remote control, I could select video stored on my PC. On my TV the video looked smooth, and its quality matched that produced on the PC's monitor. Note: At press time, Gateway said it was phasing out the Player, with no plans to introduce a replacement model.
Unfortunately, my attempts to play the Movielink movies failed. The Connected DVD Player's media server software supports only MPEG and AVI file formats, not the WMV format from Movielink. And even if the player could have handled WMV files, its lack of DRM support meant that the unit wouldn't have been able to unlock the scrambled content. The only way I could get the movies to play on the TV was to lug my notebook into the den and run S-Video and RCA stereo cables from the notebook to the TV. Picture quality on the TV screen was better than I had expected, though it was worse than that of DVDs, with some blurring.
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