On paper, Actiontec’s Wireless Digital Media Player appears no different than other products before it from competitors like SMC, Prismiq, Linksys and the many competitors that are sure to follow. One thing makes the Actiontec product stand out: it works – even wirelessly. The silver and svelte looking Wireless Digital Media Player comes with an Actiontec 802.11b PCMCIA card that can hook on to any Wi-Fi network and deliver audio, video as well as digital photos to any television screen.

Like most media players, this Actiontec product requires a PC to act as a server. We opened the box and installed the Actiontec Media Buddy both on a Windows XP workstation and a Windows 2003 server. Adding media to the software is very easy. Point the buddy software to your media folders (you can customize which folders are to be watched and where) and Actiontec will automatically build playlists based on your existing folder structures. The only missing features might be MP3-style album catalogs and the ability to create your own custom playlists. One caveat emptor: if you are playing media files over the network, we found it only worked if you mapped a network drive to the network share. Otherwise, the Wireless Digital Media Player will display an ambiguous ‘invalid’ message when playing media files placed on UNC shares. More on this message later.

One of the neat things about the Media Buddy is the ability to lock down media on any PC with a password. Moreover, you can install multiple versions and log in to browse media from a variety of computers. This is great for those people who intend to share the Wireless Digital Media Player and especially useful for those who have families and multiple PCs on the home network. It will also keep prying eyes away say in a dorm room network.

On the hardware side, the Wireless Digital Media Player requires very little to get started. Actiontec throws in a PCMCIA card which is installed by inserting it in the side. When we first installed the card, it was protruding outside of the player chassis. We thought we did it wrong when in fact, that is how a properly installed card should be. It definitely lessens the aesthetic appeal of the player itself.

Actiontec’s media player is very versatile though. RCA cables are given with the unit but you also have the option to hook up via optical (for digital audio), component and S-video. It is the first time we saw a media player support DVI output too, which means LCD monitors and higher end plasma/LCD televisions can be converted into media player setups.

We played everything from MPEGs off Kazaa to VOB files from a DVD and we couldn’t really appreciate the digital outputs but it’s nice that they are there. (There is also the doubt that the narrow 802.11b bandwidth would support digital). However, volume, which is one of the drawbacks of other media players including the one from Prismiq, is more than adequate here. It didn’t take much for the amplifier/receiver to get the volume close to home theater experience.

The performance is also fairly good. Actiontec’s built-in software is bright, iconic and fairly straightforward to use. Unfortunately, the remote has a plethora of buttons – none of which are arranged in what you could call an ergonomic fashion. It took awhile for us to understand that when you want to stop playing media, be it a slideshow of photos, a television MPEG or an MP3 soundtrack, you have to literally press stop and be transferred back to the menu. Otherwise, you could hammer away at the menu buttons all day and get the infamous ‘invalid’ message. It would be nicer if Actiontec could annotate their messages a little better.

Most media players, like the competing product from Linksys, try to get away with only music and photos. Pretty much anything can do that these days. Burn a few MP3s or JPGs to a DVD/CD and a $50 DVD player will be able to manage it. The Wireless Digital Media Player, on the other hand, can also handle video. Video on 802.11b? We thought it was absurd too, considering our previous experiences with Prismiq. But Actiontec’s video playing performance was near flawless for all MPEG-1 and SVCD formats. DVD movies, however, requires more bandwidth. Music takes a little while to queue but otherwise there are no drop outs. During our tests, we threw a bunch of different encoding formats at it, courtesy of random P2P downloads and Actiontec’s product kept humming along. In fact, the Actiontec product managed to play videos that the Prismiq product could not. Very impressive, especially since we paired it up with D-Link and SMC and Microsoft wireless access points.

Commonly an Achilles heel for media players, fast forwards and rewinds at variable speeds work fantastic here. You can use the arrow buttons to advance to a certain percentage of the clip; the remote control equivalent of moving the slider bar on your PC when viewing videos. We simply fell in love with these two features, which have always been problematic, particularly in the wireless settings.

All digital photography viewed through a low resolution television screen looks fantastic regardless of whatever megapixel camera you use. The Media Buddy software allows you to pair music soundtracks with photo slideshows or vice versa, although these things can only be done on the PC. Random playing is available on through the remote control.

Finally, if you don’t have enough media to play at home, you can tap the power of the Internet to play free radio stations, peruse websites or view news headlines in the Actiontec interface (not through the web browser) that are updated from websites like Yahoo. As expected, we found the web browser slow and the resolution too low to be of any serious usage. The news sections were nice but the lack of a keyboard makes it hard to do common day to day tasks like e-mail. Internet radio stations were also a hit or miss. Some worked without a hitch. Some would not work despite being listed in their directory.

One of the things you cannot do in the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player is simultaneously doing two things at once. You can’t listen to music and surf the web at the same time. But that simplicity has probably kept the interface lean and mean. Rarely, unless it is stuck parsing thousands of files, did we ever find the media player unresponsive. With the exception of the web browser, we never encountered any moments where we were unsure of what the media player is up to. That’s something that cannot be said of the competing products.

Back on the PC side of things, the CPU and memory utilization is low. Those who are in a home environment with shared computers will appreciate that. And we’ve always thought it defeats the purpose of the media player if the person at the computer can’t use the PC while movies are played across the living room on the television.

The Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player was a pleasant surprise. After trying prominent competitors like Linksys and Prismiq, we were expecting the same spotty wireless connections and setup hassles. With the Actiontec product, we found none of those. The biggest oversight is the remote control, the need to use the stop button to exit any media (rather than back, or home buttons) and Actiontec’s cryptic use of the message invalid. Otherwise, this is a great inaugural release for Actiontec.

For a time, we found ourselves just watching the videos for the video’s sake instead of keeping an eye out for artifacts, transmission problems or visual degradations. That, after all, is what the Wireless Digital Media Player is supposed to do – and it does it well.