Philips Streamium SL400i WiFi-Enabled Multimedia Receiver for Home and Internet Entertainment

Rating:
Summary: Very Cool - But A Work in Progress, Too
Review: Finally, a big win with the wife in the CE area! The Philips SL-400i is a "bridge" between the stuff I have on my PC and my good ol' television and stereo (my speakers are incredible hunks of wood from 1964).

The good news: I set it up in about 45 minutes and spent a Saturday morning with my wife and kids looking at pictures and dancing to music in our bedroom, where there was no music before. My wife ordered me to charge up the video camera, and all of a sudden, she *wants* me to spend time making content (playlists, movies, slideshows). My generally individual and quiet computing adventures have now been transformed into the source of group activities. If the grandparents were here, they'd be on it all day. If I had more time, I'd be watching movie trailers all the time. When the neighbors come over, I'll be showing it off. All of this is fantastic news, except for my sleep schedule.

The part of this that works best is the integration with content on the Internet. I am huge MusicMatch fan-all of my custom stations are right there in an instant.

The concept of this product is hard to get. You get this multimedia hub, but you also have to contend with a free, personal web portal to manage the Internet side of content (e.g. Yahoo!Photos, MusicMatch) called "My.Philips.com" and a piece of software for your PC called Philips Media Manager. Once you start navigating between these pieces, though, it's really cool.

The bad news:
So, this device has 4 categories of entertainment it bridges from PC to TV or stereo: Music, Photos, Movies, Games. One of the issues is limited file-type support. For example, there is no support for .wmv, .wma or .mov files for movies. That pretty much kills my home video efforts, as these are the only file types I have. Games are just little java games, but I'm hoping with the release of their java sdk, there may be some more interesting stuff.

Data entry from the remote (such as login info) is pretty Euro and a bit confusing. It's SMS-style, which I don't like. I wish it were Tivo-style onscreen. In my case, I made a password that was 5 letters and 4 numbers. When I got to entering the numbers, the first one was "1", but you have to hit "1" 4 times to get to the number 1. That stumped me for a bit.

Other notes of caution:
There are two things that make enjoying this device critical. First, use the wired connection or a flawless 802.11g wireless. Any hiccup at all in the connection ruins the experience. Second, use the television screen interface. The SL400i has it's own display, but it doesn't show enough info. The TV screen display looks like a Mac interface-beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: First generation product; works but lots of small flaws
Review: Having finally converted my 600+ music CDs into MP3s and stored them on the hard drive of my home PC a couple of months ago, I had been looking for an elegant way to link up the PC with my living room hi-fi stack ever since.

So I naturally jumped at the opportunity to evaluate a Philips Streamium SL400i, which I got around two weeks ago. I must note that I only tried out the PC link streaming functions, leaving the direct internet broadband connection option alone for the time being.

Here are my impressions:

THE GOOD:

1. Quick setup

The Streamium device worked right from the start. It took me less than 30 minutes to read through the manuals, set the device up, install the software on my PC and hook it up to the TV and the hi-fi stack.

2. Good sound and video quality

The quality of both audio (streamed MP3s) and video (streamed MPEGs) was quite good, no complaints here.

THE BAD:

1. No playback control via PC

If you are accustomed to browsing through lists of thousands of items on your TV screen using your remote control, the SL400i may be alright for you. To me, the largest disappointment with the SL400i was that there seemed to be no way to control the device via the PC. Which means you cannot choose an album to play on your hi-fi by simply punching a few strokes on your computer keyboard. Instead, you have to painstakingly navigate your PC-based media folders using the Streamium remote control, watching the folder, album and song titles slowly change either on your TV screen or the in-built LCD on the SL400i unit. Very very inconvenient - especially for those accustomed to using Winamp or other well designed digital media player on their PCs at work or at home.

The only hope is Philips can remove this shortcoming through a software upgrade.

2. No support for Windows Media and MOV video formats

As noted by other reviewers, the SL400i cannot stream WMV and MOV video files - only mpegs. Again, it is probably a software limitation that could be solved through a downloadable upgrade - but at the time of writing this review no such upgrade was available.

3. No support for Winamp playlists

You can compose your own playlists with the Philips Media Manager, but you cannot import your Winamp playlists. Having spent many hours constructing Winamp playlists over the years, I do not look forward repeating the process with the Philips Media Manager. Having in mind that such a playlist import function would have been really easy and inexpensive to add to the Philips Media Manager, one can only speculate why Philips didn't see the need to accommodate 15 million+ Winamp users worldwide when designing the Streamium family of products.

4. Software clumsy and slow

The software you have to install on your PC for the SL400i to be able to access content on your hard drive (and which you also use to manage your content, form playlists, etc.) is java-based, which means really slow. It also seems to require a lot of system resources and a lot of time just to launch (and by default it launches automatically every time you boot your PC).

5. Adding media content takes ages

Adding media (photos, mp3s) with the Philips Media Manager takes a lot of time - and you are required to "add" the media before it becomes available for viewing or listening. For instance, adding a tree of folders with 6500 medium-sized JPEG photo images (1600x1200) took over 1 hour on my 512MB RAM, 2.5Ghz processor home PC. Aaarrgh.

6. Poor Wi-Fi connectivity?

I was using the included wireless adapter to connect my PC to the SL400i unit that was located just 5 meters away in the same room and almost in direct line of sight (except for a corner of a sofa :-) ). Despite these near ideal conditions, the signal strength rarely exceeded 50% and was indicated as "low" or "fair" most of the time, occasionally moving into "good".

This DID NOT influence the playback of MP3s. Video was another matter - DVD-quality mpeg's quite frequently froze for a second or two on the TV screen while playing. This frustrated the viewers a lot, even though the playback always recovered automatically afterwards.

7. Slow browsing of media folders

While browsing through the tree of mp3 folders on the TV screen, some folders took quite a while to display their content (5-15 seconds). Then some folders never displayed their contents at all - the SL400i seemed to just hang up while waiting for the song list to appear, and required a soft reboot (pressing the PC Link button) to recover.

8. Random disconnections

For a couple of times every day, the SL400i would loose connection with the PC while playing mp3s for no apparent reason. In such cases, the song continued to be played, but the next song never started, and I had to reboot the device to get the music started again.

I believe some of the frustrating issues described above could be solved if I went to the Streamium online user support forum and listented to their advice and suggestions, then made some configuration changes. The problem is I don't have time for that. My view is configuration problems should be fixed by the manufacturer, not by the customers.

CONCLUSION:

- While I definitely need a way to get my MP3s played on my Hi-Fi, I'm NOT buying the Streamium SL400i. It is a first-generation product that could probably be called experimental, and it is suffering from numerous flaws.

- If you have a relatively small collection of music on your home PC (like up to 50 albums), don't plan to stream DVD-quality video and don't mind using your remote control to navigate your media collection, the SL400i might be just OK for you.
Otherwise, steer clear of it.


Rating:
Summary: Not bad!
Review: I got the sl400i (instead of the sl300i) so I could stack it with my other components and stream Internet radio stations to my stereo. It was easy to set up and works great.

A Web site you log into controls your online media and software you install on your PC lets you select local files to play on your stereo.

I have also used it a lot to view slide shows on my TV (I take a lot of digital photos), which is very easy and convenient, and much better than showing them on my PC in my messy office.

The only problem I've had so far is my wireless(g) network isn't fast enough. Streamium chokes on large files and especially videos, but I think this is a limitation of network speed rather than the unit itself. Videos are much better with a wired connection.

BTW, I learned that trick at streamiumcafe.com, a forum site with all sorts of info and suggestions.




Rating:
Summary: Nice way to get a lot of content to TV - good for kids
Review: I have been using the Streamium MC-i250 for a long time - I am a great fan of diverse music - I got an SL400i (also thinking about an MX6000i for the living room) - it has a local diplay so the TV doesn't need to be on - this is great for music - I have Live365 and on the SL400i I can find something interesting and new everytime I look - last night - Russian POP music (several stations) - and the Arabic POP and then Glen Gould playing Bach - all streaming - its great - no downloading - then playing to see if you like it, then deleting the files..... streaming music rules!

Now for the Video - I have a bunch of Kid's movies on a computer at home - they can now watch them on the TV - my 3 year old and 4 year old can both turn on the Streamium, navigate to thier content (after hitting PC Link) and watch what they want - this is really, really good - with the kids putting DVDs into the player - they would through them, scratch them, an abuse the DVD player - now everything is simple - SL400 is great -

BONUS ROUND - watching the photo slide show is great - now everyone is looking at pictures - we just start running the show - and since we have 2500 digital photos - they just keep going and going - the boys love it - and we talk about each picture - really, really cool - One short coming - it doesn't play a music file while the Photo slide show is going... but maybe sometime!

Reality check - It is better to use wired for video - I have thick walls so wireless is not as reliable as I would like. also some of the DivX files I have are 1.5 MBPS encoding, and they don't play well, and there are some freezes, the Streamium recovers - but better not play these files - majority of files are encoded at 1 mbps and they are fine.

I had problems with XP SP2 - with the integrated firewall - I got it going - go to www.streamiumcafe.com - there are tons of streamium experts that do address every obscure problem with media networks - some are real freaks...

Generally with XP SP2 seems like WiFi hotspots, and Web sites and everything is more complicated I need to close browser windows, some popups get blocked - too bad security needs to be so tight....

All and all with Streaming from internet, and with PC Link the Streamiums will make most people happy - and I do recommend them to my friends - btw - I looked at building a Window Media Center PC - but cost was higher (streamium lets me use my existing computers) and there would be NO WAY my boys could use that....

Note I only gave the SL400i 4 stars - but then again, I only gave my IPOD 4 stars....... still room for improvement