The DP-1504 from KiSS not only integrates your broadband Internet service with your home theater, it also houses its very own 40 GB hard drive so you can keep your most critical media files--from music to pictures to full-motion video--right at your fingertips, whether you're at your computer or relaxing in your living room at day's end. The stylish, compact player spins DVD-Videos and music CDs, including MP3 CDs. Its Ethernet cable jack and PC Card slot--together with the supplied wireless Local Area Network (LAN) card--make it easy to hook the player up to your wireless home network to stream music, digital photos, and even DivX and MPEG-4 movies right from your computer. The DP-1504 offers upgradeable firmware, too, so you can keep the player up-to-date through updates from the KiSS Web site.
The player's sizeable hard disk holds up to 58 Internet-sourced DivX films (including DivX 3.11, 4, and 5), or somewhere on the order of 8,000 128 kbps MP3 music files, or about 100,000 JPEG image files. All these files are easily accessible through a user-friendly list displayed on the TV screen. You can even use the Ethernet connection to ferry your media between your PC and the DP-1504.
Format compatibility--whether you're playing off a DVD, recordable CD, your PC, or the player's hard-disk drive (HDD), extends from DVD-Video to MP3, Ogg Vorbis (an open-source version of MP3), JPEG files, DivX, XviD, and DVD+R/+RW, and DVD-R/-RW. DivX files have the potential to look and sound much like what you see and hear from your DVDs.
MP3 features include full file name display using the onscreen menu and ID3 tag details for the currently playing track (when encoded). You can navigate through a disc's folders while a track is playing.
Media management between your PC and the DVD player occurs via the supplied KiSS PC-Link software (Windows 98 and up), which allows the DP-1504 to "see" your music, pictures, and motion-video files. It sees only the files you show it, and you can run the program on multiple PCs simultaneously. You can also listen to Internet radio through the player's WebRadio feature, though you can only access WebRadio when the player is connected to a broadband Internet client. For direct results, feed a Cat-5 cable from your modem right into the player.
If you're using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), the player ought to be able to lock to your IP address automatically. Alternately, you can use the manual setting, which requires knowledge of fairly intimate PC operations such as checking the PC's static IP address and making sure the PC's port number 8000 is not in use and is accessible from behind your Windows and/or third-party firewall. You can always use Cat-5 Ethernet cables, of course, between your PC and your router, between the router and the DVD player, or even directly between your computer and the DVD player.
The player uses the French-developed SCART connection for its high-res progressive-scan component-video signal, and a supplied cable provides an interface for use with the standard RCA-tipped jacks on associated equipment. The SCART output allows the player to channel video signals in a manner consonant with RGB computer monitors (RGB adapter cable not included).
Other outputs include standard composite- and S-video connections and one each coaxial and optical digital-audio jacks for passing Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel surround signals to a compatible audio/video receiver.
What's in the Box
DVD player, a ZyAIR B-120 wireless LAN PC card, a remote control, 2 AAA batteries, a composite-video interconnect, a stereo analog audio interconnect, a SCART-to-RCA component-video adapter cable, a CD-ROM (PC Link software), user's manuals (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dansk, Portuguese, and Nederlands), an AC power cord, and an EU AC power cord.
