Buffalo LinkTheater Wireless A&G

Has this ever happened to you? You’ve just arrived back from an awesome trip with the family and everyone wants to see the pictures and video you took; only, it’s all on your computer. If you’re fortunate enough to have a laptop, you may be able to connect it to your TV using S-video or DVI.

Ultimately, however, you’re either spending 10 minutes setting up the connection or asking everyone to crowd around your computer monitor to see all the pixelated goodness.

It just makes sense to get yourself a device that will grab the content from any computer in the home and display it on your home theater setup. And the Buffalo Technologies LinkTheater is definitely a step in the right direction.

The LinkTheater Wireless A&G Network Media Player connects to your home theater just like any other A/V component, through analog or digital high definition connections. Before you start, however, you need to install some software on the PC or Mac that will essentially turn it into a media server. This part was especially easy and useful. One thing I haven’t liked about other systems of this ilk is they essentially force you to broadcast everything that’s on your PC to the world. The Buffalo LinkTheater lets you choose the folders you want to broadcast. We chose My Pictures and My Music.

Back at the LinkTheater, setting it up to work on our network was nearly a breeze. The interface is clean and the included remote control is just as intuitive as a DVD remote. The LinkTheater is souped up to allow you to connect it to Intel Viiv platforms with relative ease. It also includes both 802.11a and 802.11g antennas, using the “g” for data and the “a” for media, if it’s on a network that includes both protocols. Ours did not, so we only used the “g” band. The only frustrating part about setting up was inputting the wireless security key. Instead of having a box of letters and numbers on the screen to select from, like when you put your initials in for the high score on a video game, the LinkTheater makes you type it in like a text message over a mobile phone.

While all of our videos and pictures were available once we connected the LinkTheater, the music folders were incomplete. I would select certain albums that were complete on my PC, but only three or four songs from the album showed up on the LinkTheater screen. I haven’t figured out why this is the case. The LinkTheater also wouldn’t play videos that I recorded using my Samsung Digimax digital camera, which unfortunately stores those videos in Xvid. While I can fix this problem on the PC side, by downloading the Xvid codec, no such solution seemed to be available on the LinkTheater, outside of converting those videos on my PC to a more common format, like MPEG or Windows Media.

One thing I did like about the LinkTheater is that you can use it to serve up content from multiple devices throughout the home, including a PC, Mac, connected storage device (like the LinkTheater Live Multimedia Storage we used), and finally a USB Flash drive, for which there’s a port on the front of the LinkTheater.

The LinkStation storage unit was connected to our network over Ethernet so it served up the same content a lot faster. However, we discovered you need to download the updated software from Buffalo’s Web site in order for your Windows XP computer to recognize the LinkStation.

I think, with some time, you can get the LinkTheater to answer all the needs you have of presenting the content from your computers and media storage devices to your television. But it is going to require some tinkering. I have a feeling there’s a lot of people who enjoy doing that. yy