As a lead up to the holiday, I took my daughter to work with me. We were in a social mood, and on a whim we went to Frys with Don, one of my coworkers.

    On a previous trip to Fry’s, I looked at some D-Link gear designed to playback digital media on an HD set. Don was interested in the gear as well, but we couldn’t tell if the gear was so full of DRM as to be locked into one platform or the other. There were several models, and I couldn’t figure out why there was so much functional overlap. The only clue so far is that the physically smallest model had Intel Viiv badging on the box. To further confuse things, the specs pages at the D-Link site mention MPEG-4 playback, but the footnotes pin this to “Advanced Simple Profile only without quarter pixel or global motion compensation”. So now I’m faced with more questions: 1) What space savings can I expect over MPEG2? 2) Do the free compressors handle MPEG-4 ASP? 3) How does MPEG-4 ASP compare visually with unrecoded MPEG2? 4) What services does the D-Link medialounge devices need from the server holding the media?

    I’m still working on my DXR3  based project to build a CCTV station in a box. I begin to wonder if I shouldn’t re-examine the Hauppauge Media MVP to see if suitable third party software has arrived to make VOB playback possible. The decreasing number of slots in a modern PC leads to this “inside or outside device” question all the time. The Linksys / Sipura-3000 or Grandstream HandyTone 488 also raises this question when compared with the Digium TDM11B.