Buffalo Link Theater review

You shelled out loads of cash on that big TV - so why are you watching the movie trailer you just downloaded on a pokey little monitor? Buffalo's Link Theater is designed to avoid you having to, by streaming video from your PC to your TV.

It's about the size of a DVD player - it plays DVDs too - and connects to your telly in a similar way. Provided you're running 'media server' software - either Buffalo's own Link Theater program, or Microsoft's Windows Media Connect - on a PC connected to the Link Theater, you can then use it to view video files stored on that PC.

Does it work? After a fashion, although setup is needlessly fiddly. You have to enter the IP address of your computer manually, and inexplicably the system makes you use mobile phone-style text entry ("d... e.... f.... 3") to do it, even though you're entering a string of numbers with a numeric keypad!

Streaming video worked well with DivX files, although some MPEGs that we thought would work, didn't. Very high quality files may not work over wireless because it's not fast enough. Annoyingly, if you stop playing a video file, the next time you open it, you're put right back at the beginning, rather than resuming where you left off as you would with a £30 DVD player. This is made worse because there's an annoying buffering pause after fast-forwarding, and of course most video files don't have chapters.

Although it doesn't have a proper SCART output, you can use a SCART adapter with the supplied component video cables. The picture quality is good enough when you consider that DivX files are somewhere between VHS and DVD in quality anyway. The Buffalo is no replacement for a decent DVD player because it's region locked, meaning that you can't play US releases.

If you have a large collection of video files, and a wireless network, a device like this is worth considering, but Buffalo will have to make its products easier to use and cheaper before we'd recommend them.

Author: Ben Henley