|
Photograph courtesy of Prismiq
 See Also
Tech TIME Archive
 |
 |
By WILSON ROTHMAN
A small black box connected to your TV and audio receiver, the Prismiq MediaPlayer allows you to stream photos, MP3 music files and a variety of video formats from networked PCs to your living room TV screen. Since the MediaPlayer supports wireless networking cards (sold separately), this could be an easy — if not exactly inexpensive — way to access your computer's content from the couch. A no-frills browser lets you do limited Web surfing. Better still, MediaPlayer has an AIM-compatible chat program. Of course, unless you're really good at phone-pad typing — and I'm told that some people in Japan and Scandinavia really are — you'll probably avoid chatting until you pony up another $50 for a wireless keyboard.
The Prismiq software is upgradeable, which is good, because you're going to need it. The music player is fine if you've ripped all of your songs into individual folders, but if you're like me and have a giant pool of MP3s, it's not so easy to dive right in. Ditto with the photo viewer, which needs a better sorting feature and an automatic slideshow mode. The video viewer was simple and smooth, but perhaps that's because I have far fewer video files than songs or pictures.
If Prismiq finds its audience — maybe the people who download feature-length films on Kazaa — it could really take off. Although there isn't a TiVo-like video-recording feature, MediaPlayer is compatible with newer wireless networking systems like 802.11g, which can stream video from one location to another without hiccupping. Which means high-quality video recording may not be far off. Now that would be something.
|
