Well, usually speaking, this is not where I write product reviews, but this needs to get published online to clear up some misconceptions there are with these Digital Media Receivers.

D-LINK makes a wide variety of Wireless digital media receivers that basically sit on top of your TV and connect to your sound system and provide you streaming video, music, and photos from your computer. They call them their medialounge series. A neat deal if you've got something like yahoo music, right? Well I have yahoo music, and I even signed up for rhapsody part way through my review, so now I can give some real cold hard facts. Before purchasing, I contacted both yahoo support and d-link support, and I got mixed answers (or in some cases, no answers). I read a billion product reviews that more or less reviewed the alleged feature set but not the actual features as they were. So last night I picked up both the 520 and the 320 to see how they match against each other, and further-more, which would be right for me and my Yahoo Music Unlimited Account.

Before I go any further, I'd like to point out that my ultimate goal was to be able to browse the entire yahoo music catalog on this device. This way no matter what I wanted to play, I could find it. Thanks to the on-screen keyboard function, this would've been something that would actually work, save one problem - they didn't implement it. You can only play music that was added to your library. However, it DID plaster the box and the on-screen menus with the rhapsody logo saying you can connect to online media using rhapsody. DO IT! I'll get more into that in a bit.

First: The DSM-520. Similar to the 320, but with WMV support, and oh yeah, high definition. Not a big deal for me, I don't have a high-definition TV. However, one big difference I also saw was the yahoo music logo was on the box of the 520, but not the 320. Now, technically you can connect to any upnp server that serves up this content, however, if they were to implement my "browse catalog" feature, I'd need proprietary support, so that means look for the logo.

First impressions. I hooked up the DSM-520 with high hopes. Costing around $250 online and surprisingly cheap (on sale) at best buy at $199, I had hopes of grandeur. I was determined to get this working, despite the poor reviews that preceded it. Unfortunately, it was just so bad, I couldn't save it.

Setting up the network was pretty simple, I did wired, cause I didn't want to deal with the wireless quite yet (I heard it was buggy, and I needed to know in the future what problems were the device, and what problems were the wireless.)

The machine is slow. The menus are animated, however the animation is skippy. My brother said it the best: "Dedicated hardware should just work." I'd expect those skips on my windows media center computer. Not my dedicated all-I-do-is-video receiver. First impression was pretty bad. I immediately connected to my yahoo network upnp server (yahoo jukebox has this built in, you just have to turn it on), and bingo- there I was searching my library (not the whole catalog mind you, just my small library of about 300 songs). Ok, now how about the audio quality? Well let's see... license not acquired?! Apparently this "Plays for sure" device doesn't like yahoo's "plays for sure" DRM protected content. Great. The machine's been on for about 10 minutes now, and I haven't heard any noise. Depressing.

I connected to a 3rd party upnp server, and loaded up some non-drm WMAs and MP3s, and finally, our first sound came blasting through. Sounded fine. So audio quality gets a thumbs up... except when it skips. Well, to be fair, it didn't skip much, but it seems when going through the media menus (you can browse while music plays, heck you can start a slide show while music plays) the music would skip while loading the playlists and file lists. Probably network traffic... except I was wired on a 100 mb connection. That's more than enough to handle streaming one song (which by then should've been cached) and loading a list of 5 titles of songs.

Side note: the menus were pretty intuitive, except the fact that once you start playing a song, you can go back and browse your library or start a slide show, I don't know how to get back to the "now playing" screen. I just can't find a way to do it. Probably my ignorance - but I felt I should mention that they didn't make this part very easy.

Video playback was easy and useful, streaming mpgs with ease, avis that had ridiculous codecs that took me weeks to find online just played in this (that includes your lovely divx stuff you pirates). And as rumored, I was able to backup a DVD I have using dvd shrink, and rename the VOB files to .MPG and they played perfectly. I didn't, however, get surround sound on the DVD mpg playback; however I believe that to be a problem with how I backed up the DVD. I will try again tonight to make sure I didn't down-sample it. Video playback gets a thumbs up from me - the only redeeming quality of this player. Oh, and on the 520, we have picture-in-picture, allowing you to see the video playback in a SMALL SMALL SMALL thumbnail window while browsing the menus. Just about useless in my opinion, because it's so small.

Pictures - I won't spend much time on this. Yeah, it "streams" pictures. Slowly if their big, my rebel xt pics which are 3+ mb take a long time. But it works. Oh, and yes, you can choose whether or not it scales the pics to fit, or if you want to crop them for full screen. If you crop, you will lose some of the picture, deal with it. Your pictures aren't the same ratio as your TV screen.

As far as high-def goes, I couldn't review any of that, I didn't have high def anything. So.. I bet it works.

So over-all? Didn't do a thing I wanted it for. Yahoo didn't work. And, no, not even after checking for updates (I had the latest revision). So, as the lemming I am, I decided to take this free 30-day trial coupon included in the box and try out rhapsody. I wanted to browse a catalog from my TV, I didn't care how or how much money it'd cost.

Thoughts on rhapsody - First thing's first, the coupon code they provide is expired. I contacted rhapsody support, they said too bad, out of luck. I told them I was switching to yahoo. Then I took advantage of a different offer I found snooping around for 14 days free. Not quite a month, but enough to find out if rhapsody was rhype with catalogabrowsity.

I set everything up and got it running, and I hate the interface. Yahoo wins on this one. So it was time to jump back on the DSM-520 and give it a spin. And guess what, I don't even have to connect to this server in the settings. I just click the rhapsody button on the online menu, and it detects and starts loading... nothing. I went back to the pc, added a few songs (just streams, not downloads), and sure enough that fixed part of the issue. Now on my TV screen, I see all my tracks that I just added. But can I browse the catalog? No. Hmmm. Great. The number one feature I wanted one of these doesn't even work with their preferred company - rhapsody. (Rhapsody DOES provide this functionality with the sansa).

Aside from all of this, I found the player to be buggy at best, freezing whenever it had trouble doing something - to the point where the power button didn't work, and it was time to unplug. It froze on me 4 times within the 1 hour I tested it. Let's hope the 320 is better.

From what I could tell, the 320 was like the 520, but without the High definition. And no WMV support. Hmm.. ? Strange.

My experience was similar, except a few things, mainly: Yahoo music worked out-of-box. It just connected and played, no problems. It even played bookmarks (great if you just make a bunch of playlists of streams). Still, no catalog searching/browsing, but I guess I already realized this wasn't going to happen when I played with the 520.

Video playback was the same, minus WMV. Not too broken up about that. Oh, and no picture-in-picture. Big whoop. Useless feature anyway.

Photo playback was the same, no big things here.

Overall, I enjoyed the 320 more than the 520. I didn't experience any freezing. The menus weren't choppy (they weren't animated either, but at least they knew their limitations. It just looks better with static menus than choppy animated menus). However, there was one major quirk with the 320. Every time I turn it on, it seems to "lose" the network. I go into setup, and it appears to be fine, but no media servers connect. So I have reset the DCHP and re-acquire an IP address, and then re-choose my media server. This is about 2 minutes of work every time I turn on the device. Annoying. Also - twice now it won't see the media servers on my network (my sparkling clean network). It wouldn't see them until a restart, and another reconfig. Strange.

Wireless: My device was in a moderately hot hot-spot. It seems to work just as well, but it did take a little longer to load things. One thing to notice, it stopped playing tracks after a few songs. Probably not a big deal, this device was set up for 54 mb, and my wireless is 11 mb. I'd say, if you're having wireless problems, it's probably not the device so much as the many problems all wireless networks experience. Turn off your phones and microwave, get a new router, and cross your fingers troubleshooting. This existed way before the medialounges, don't let them take the blame.

So which one to get? Well the 320 was $79, and the 520 was $199. I liked the 320 better than the 520. If you NEED high definition, get the 520, otherwise I'd recommend the 320. Either way it's a compromise. These are not fully functioning devices. They should still be in the lab. They're not very good at all. But for $79, it's better than getting a new video card with TV-out, and dedicating a media computer to your media center. So, you win some and you lose some.

Why this technology sucks for the music listeners: Until they give you full catalog capabilities, I can't see this taking off. As far as the video parts go, it'll work great with nerds, but your basic home users will have no use for this. (not to mention, no idea what the heck this even does). I believe the video to be a nice bonus feature, but what's really going to make this sell is the real life honest people who pay for download and subscription music. These are the only people who will venture to buy this (again, aside from the nerds who download anime), and with its crippled functionality, I just can't see this taking off yet. We're on the verge of this media switch from cds and dvds to complete online content. I believe two things stand in our way:

1. DRM - until they finally kill this beast, nobody's going to take the plunge.

2. Stupid crap like these medialounges. Get your crap together. Get these things working. Nobody's going to buy the sansa, it's cheaper to buy a media center computer and throw it in the living room. And any way you look at it, the CD player I bought 5 years ago still works and doesn't "lose" its configuration every time I turn it off.

These things won't take off until they're turn-key. I'm rather technologically-minded, and my whole life is dealing with things like this. But my mom rather just throw on a trusty VHS and sit back and enjoy.

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