Philips Streamium SL400i review

Philips' SL400i is a set-top box that connects to your TV using either wired or wireless networking.

It plays music and shows photos and video files. Although the SL400i is not the only device to do this - we reviewed Pinnacle's ShowCenter in our May 2004 issue - it has a number of advantages over the competition.

While the ShowCenter offers wireless networking as an optional extra, the SL400i has fast wireless networking built-in and comes with a USB adapter, which adds wireless networking to your PC. Simple instructions help networking novices get the two working together, although they omit to mention that the network should be set to 'Ad hoc' mode for a direct connection between the SL400i and the PC.

Another advantage over the ShowCenter is the SL400i's front panel display, which lets you select music to play on your hi-fi without switching on your TV. However, while the screen is packed with information, it's hampered slightly by some odd behaviour that makes it more awkward to use than the menu the device displays on a TV screen.

Best of all is the SL400i's ability to access movie trailers, pop videos, basic games and thousands of radio stations via broadband Internet. It can connect to the Internet via your PC - or directly through a broadband router, if you have one. This eliminates the need for you to even switch on your PC. Sadly though, connecting the SL400i to our existing wireless network proved tricky. It seemed as if it wasn't storing the WEP encryption key we'd typed in. It turned out that we had to enable two separate MAC addresses (unique identifying codes) on our router's wireless permission settings.

Using the SL400i wasn't without its problems, either. We sometimes needed to restart the box to establish a connection with a PC, and although the software is simple to use, browsing files is sluggish. It's a shame it can't hold a database of file names internally to speed up navigation. It would also help if the Philips supported a broader range of media formats. It didn't recognise WMA, WMV or QuickTime files and tried, but failed, to play DivX, AVI and some MPEG-4 video files. MPEG-1 playback was smooth, but high-quality MPEG-2 files strained the bandwidth of the wireless connection, resulting in occasional glitches.

The SL400i shows a lot of promise and works superbly, its online features being a highlight. Whether it takes a software update or the next generation of Streamiums to resolve our concerns remains to be seen, but for now there are too many glitches for us to recommend spending such a large amount of money.

Author: Ben Pitt