Buffalo LinkTheater HD Nfiniti Wireless Media Player review

The LinkTheater HD supports Draft-N WiFi on both 2.4 and 5GHz, and its two antennas can be replaced to improve its range. It supports both UPnP and SMB, so you can use Windows Media Player or share folders in Windows. Buffalo includes UPnP server software but it was difficult to get working in Vista. Using shared folders is easier than using Media Player and you’ll benefit from the LinkTheater’s excellent native support for a wide range of video formats. These include Matroshka (MKV), WMV-HD and H.264 MPEG4 files, although some MPEG files with AC3 audio played without sound. Some DivX AVI files with poor audio- and video-codec tagging also failed to play correctly. The LinkTheater is one of very few streamers we’ve seen that supports Microsoft’s DRM10, so it can play many protected WMA and WMV files. You can also play files from USB mass storage devices. Buffalo’s interface has a no-frills feel to it, and the clean look makes it easy to use. A handful of options are available from the home screen, where you can browse media and view bookmarked and recently played files. Photo thumbnails are extremely small, though. A zoom button lets you switch between original size and full-screen display and the only setting you can adjust in the configuration menu is the slideshow interval. Unlike most of the streamers here, the LinkTheater doesn’t support online video and audio services, so you can’t watch YouTube clips or listen to internet radio. Unusually, it can back up video files from a USB camcorder to either a USB flash drive or a shared folder.

At this price the LinkTheater is good value, but D-Link’s DSM-510 is a better choice if you don’t need the wide format support.