Solwise DMP-1120w UPnP/DLNA network media player

Switching to the Mac, we had much the same experience. With EyeConnect's DLNA server up and running, the DMP-1120w took an age to spot it over a wireless network. Connection made - eventually - we started listening to music and watching photo slide shows. And then the connection dropped. One minute the DMP-1120w could see the server, the next minute it couldn't. EyeConnect was running, but Solwise's box couldn't see it. It came back - eventually...

Ambitions to be an Apple TV?

Now, we're happy to acknowledge that the user manual does say that running both the PC-router and DMP-router links wirelessly may cause signal congestion and delay when watching video, but having to hard-wire and part of PC-router-DMP part of the link shouldn't be a precondition for the system working at all, which it seems to be for reasons that frankly escape us. Duff wireless unit in the review sample, perhaps?

Will connect to an HD TV, but the output's SD only

Having added our iTunes music library to Windows Media Player we were more than a little alarmed to find that when they were called up on the TV screen all our albums now had fully alphabetised according to filename track listings, despite reading correctly in the WMP library.

To be fair, TVersity made an even bigger hash of sorting the media on our test PC. Adding the opportunity to access web-based content to take your mind off your now probably rather chaotic, and in our case partly missing, media library really isn't much of a trade off. There's no YouTube access, but the DMP-1120w will connect to Flikr and to internet radio station database Radiotime - though our favourite statiom, California's Radio Paradise, was missing from the list.

Given time and patience it may be possible to find a free media server application that the Solwise is happy to work with - EyeConnect costs 36 quid - but we can't help but think that this should be Solwise's job, not the consumer's.

EyeConnect made a better stab of things: our iTunes library, complete with playlists, came up on the TV screen, with the songs correctly listed by track number. No album art, mind...

Look, ma, no album art...

The manual lists supported video formats as MPEGs 1-4, Motion JPEG, DivX and XVid. Well, maybe in an ideal world they are but how do you actually add MPEG 4 files to the media library of WMP when WMP won't recognise them as playable media in the first place? When we tried playing an MPEG 4 file off an SD card all we got was a flashing pink and green TV screen which meant that AVI files were the only ones we actually managed to get to work at the end of the day. DivX downloads should have no problems, though.