Get Media Savvy Carlos Perez knows a thing or two about high tech. The 37-year-old developer in Germantown, Maryland, purchased a Gateway ADC-320 Connected DVD player a month ago, hoping to use its wireless capability to stream video and audio from his PC to his living room. The promise was tantalizing: His PC would serve as a media database, feeding music and movies to his other home electronics. Liens Commerciaux Like other so-called media adapters, the Connected DVD player hooks up to stereos and TVs using standard cables, then pulls digital media off a host PC's hard drive over a wireless network. For Perez, building a bridge between his living room electronics and a growing collection of PC-based digital media made sense. "My intent was to use the computer as a main server and store DVDs and recorded TV episodes so I could access them wirelessly from the living room and stream it into the player," Perez explains. "The nice draw was that it came with a wireless 802.11g card. I didn't want to have to wire a cable to the basement." Unfortunately, the Connected DVD player (recently discontinued) sorely disappointed Perez. Network connectivity problems, a poor on-screen interface, and video playback issues all but scuttled his efforts to bridge the gap between the home PC and the entertainment center. Today, Perez's Connected DVD serves as a regular progressive scan DVD player. Perez hopes one day to coax life out of the unit by hacking the server software. "The reason you buy this device and the reason it sits in your living room is the convenience. But if it's so hard to get the video into the machine, it loses the convenience," says Perez. Alas, this kind of tale is all too common in the emerging area of media adapters. Michael Paxton, senior analyst at research firm Instat/MDR, says return rates for media adapters are often in the 30 percent range. He says ease-of-use problems--poorly designed software, inscrutable device interfaces, and incompatible media formats among them--plague many media adapters. Throw in digital rights management, the technology used to lock up files from download services like Musicmatch or ITunes, and you have the makings of a consumer marketing disaster. The Creative Labs Sound Blaster Wireless Music adapter, for instance, will ably stream both WMA and MP3 audio files. But when it runs across a DRM-protected file from the Musicmatch download service, the adapter simply freezes, often for a minute or longer. "Whether you are buying from a PC vendor or an accessory provider, it has been iffy," says Rob Enderle, a technology analyst for the Enderle Group and owner of several media adapter products. "The products often only work with one of the online music providers. The networking problems have been kind of a nightmare. And there was no consistent interface. It was very reminiscent of the first Windows interfaces that were on DOS. Very basic, and not much help at all if you got in trouble." Help Is on the Way The good news is that more sophisticated and well-thought-out products are on the way, with many hitting store shelves in time for the holiday season. The bad news? Some of these more refined products come at a steep price, and the rest require you to align with Microsoft. The Sonos Digital Music System is a good case in point--or will be, once it ships. This intriguing package is built around ZonePlayers, an attractive line of audio modules that include an integrated 50-watt-per-channel amplifier and two speaker jacks. Users can deploy up to 32 ZonePlayers, which communicate with the host PC over a wireless network. A PDA-size controller with a color LCD screen offers a superior remote interface, and can independently control all ZonePlayers. The Sonos Introductory Bundle, with the Sonos Controller and two ZonePlayers, will cost an eye-popping $1199. Each additional ZonePlayer is $499. However, DRM-protected files are not yet supported. "Sonos is a great system for music, just gorgeous. But it won't work with anything else," warns Enderle, such as other media adapter components. The Yamaha MusicCast system takes a different tack, integrating an 80GB hard disk in a central controller module to store up to 1000 hours of music for streaming over a wireless network. Playback occurs on elegant-looking MusicCast MCX-A10 Digital Audio Terminal wireless modules, which can be ordered with optional integrated speakers. But prices for the Yamaha equipment are even higher--about $2000 for the MusicCast MCX-1000 server and nearly $600 for each MCX-A10 client. And like the Sonos solution, you are committed to Yamaha with this purchase. Affordable Media Solutions If all you want to do is pipe music to an existing stereo, you can go with a less expensive solution, like the Creative Sound Blaster Wireless Music ($199), Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter ($150), or Netgear Wireless Digital Music Player ($120). All three products plug into a receiver or amplifier and receive streamed MP3 and WMA digital audio files from a host PC. (For quick looks at several media products for the holiday season, see the accompanying article "Holiday Shopping List.") The downside to these products? DRM-protected music won't play on them, meaning a growing collection of tunes bought from sites such as Musicmatch or Rhapsody will be confined to your PC. In addition, all three low-cost wireless devices require you to install proprietary media-server software on the PC. The programs run constantly in the background and often require a good bit of tweaking to make sense of the existing track and playlist information in your Winamp, Musicmatch, or other jukebox application. To get past these issues, you're probably best off with new products that support a technology called Microsoft Windows Media Connect. WMC is a platform that presents a common media-server software base to device makers. So the D-Link MediaLounge DSM-320 Wireless Media Player and Omnifi DMS1 Digital Media Streamer, for example, provide a consistent set of features and functionality. More important, both products, and others based on WMC, are able to play DRM-protected WMA files. In the end, WMC may make a Microsoft-centric approach the best one for owners of Windows XP (news - web sites)-based PCs. "You either align with Microsoft or you align with a hardware vendor," Enderle says. "There is nobody else that is supplying the type of cross-platform ease of use that is really where the consumers want it to be." PlaysForSure Devices Microsoft's effort to address this complaint has given us the PlaysForSure branding campaign. Similar to the familiar "Intel Inside" effort, PlaysForSure is intended to reduce confusion about what will work with what when buying media devices. Any hardware sporting the PlaysForSure logo will have been certified to work with Microsoft Media Player 10 and its DRM technology. Just as important, all devices and services with the PlaysForSure logo should work together smoothly, ending the guesswork of getting portable MP3 players or media adapters to play nicely with online content services and desktop PCs. PlaysForSure-branded portable music devices include Rio, IRiver, and Creative Labs MP3 portable music players. Branded services include MSN Music, Musicmatch, Napster, and MusicNow, as well as the CinemaNow video-on-demand download service. A number of PlaysForSure media adapters--including the Omnifi DMS1 and D-Link MediaLounge DSM-320--are also available. Microsoft has long targeted the 2004 holiday buying season for its big media adapter push. And it looks like that plan is shaping up nicely. Windows Media Connect and the PlaysForSure program are helping iron out the ugly DRM and software wrinkles that marred earlier products. Now the other shoe has dropped. Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 promises to make the whole converged PC entertainment experience even simpler. It offers welcome tweaks like the ability to record from three tuners simultaneously and HDTV support (though it's limited to over-the-air broadcasts). Perhaps most significant, new Windows Media Center PCs can work with wireless, media-savvy satellite devices--called Media Center Extenders--that hook up to the PC and stereo. Media Center Extenders are slim, fanless devices that eliminate the need to place a PC in the living room. As the term "extender" implies, Media Center Extenders let you control the remote Media Center PC rather than simply call content off it. Unlike media adapters, which harvest files on a disk drive for playback, extenders interact with the Media Center PC, using the TV to display familiar Media Center menus and interface. So from the living room, you can use the remote control to call up a photo slide show, start a music playlist, or command the remote Media Center PC to record a football game or download files from an online music service. There's just one problem: You have to buy a brand-new PC (and of course the extender device) to make all this work. But at least this time, you stand a decent chance of getting the stuff to work. And as Carlos Perez will tell you, that's more than half the battle. Michael Desmond is a freelance writer living in Burlington, Vermont.