Customer Reviews

Impressed
I bought this to replace the DSM-320 and it is worlds better. The user interface is great - and faster. Playback was an issue with the 320 - on the 330 its smooth as silk and the quality is much better too. I'm impressed - and for £99 this is a bargain. The only surprise was that its not UPnP compatible - but DivX Connected software works just fine.

Just what I've been looking for
I can only echo the other positive reviews for this device. The user interface is great, it even reminds me a little of the Tivo which also had a very good ui. All my videos, music and photos are now easily accessible via my TV.

The way this device works is that the main software runs on a PC. All the DSM-330 has to do is show or playback the media being sent to it, which includes the user interface. Since the device is relatively simple and has no hard drives etc., it has the great advantage that it needs no fans so it is completely silent! I did consider buying an Xbox as an alternative, which apparantly also makes a very good media streamer, but the main thing that put me off (apart from the extra cost, although obviously the Xbox also does a lot more than the DSM-330) was that from what I read the Xbox is quite noisy.

The main disadvantage with this product is that you need a reasonably good PC running all the time while you use the DSM-330. For me that was no problem, but I could imagine that for some that would be an issue.

The DSM-330 can only natively play back Divx or Xvid video (these are both based on MPEG4). However, the following link shows a simple way to support many more formats:
http://www.kamiwa.de/node/11
This works by having the host PC decode and then re-encode into Divx on the fly. I have tried this and I can confirm that it works remarkably well (I'm using a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1GHz and running Windows Vista as the host PC).

I have also been very impressed with the quality of the wireless connection. I did buy some ethernet cable at the same time that I bought this device, since I assumed that video over wireless would be problematic, but so far I've seen no problems with anything I've tried to play back, so I may not bother installing the wired connection. (I'm using a BT Home Hub wireless router.)

The only problem I did encounter was when I first tried to connect to my wireless network. I had a 32 character WPA key, and despite taking great care and entering it about half a dozen times (which gets very tedious, I can tell you!) it would not connect. I changed the WPA key on the router so that it just had 16 characters, and it connected first time. I therefore suspect the DSM-330 may have a problem with longer WPA keys. In the end, not a serious problem, but it was annoying that it wasted quite a lot of time and I then had to go round all my other wireless devices and change the WPA key.

Unimpressed except for the interface.
I bought the DSM-300 because I wanted a wireless media player, unfortunately I couldn't get the wireless to work at a satisfactory speed even though I've got XBMC working fine on the same network. With network cable from laptop it worked flawlessly but the whole idea was to use it wirelessly hence only two stars from me.

Also the USB port is for maintenance only, so you can not play movies from it which is a wasted opportunity in my opinion.