Kiss ethernet DVD

We must have been the last household in the West to own a DVD-player. Over the last months there has been increased pressure from the kids to buy one and as the Christmas period was approaching and as I noticed that some DVDs are selling cheaper than Video I did my homework going through articles on the subject in consumers’ magazines. In one of them I noticed one type of DVD-player that was not mentioned in the test because it stood out a bit : it had an Ethernet-connection! The player was a KISS DP-500 player from the Danish firm KISS-technology. Because I was already dreaming about spending some time to get our home-network upgraded, I was immediately interested but needed to find out more.

Fortunately, there is an extremely active users’ forum but also a rather negative one. If you ever want to buy a KISS-product, read this forum for two hours and you are likely to change your mind. Here a typical reply to a question : “Should I buy a DP-500?” from the ever-present Lord KiRon :

No , don’t buy , DP-500 will be a big disappointment for you unless all that you need is a networked player.

Bugs , problems , freezes ,plays too few of file types you can play on your PC .
Well all of this is not that common , it’s not like you having to get all this problems with everything you play every time but it still very annoying.

And it’s overpriced too , if it cost 1/2 of it current price I could tell you – “get it it worth it’s value” but you going to pay about 300dlr for a player that do the same things 100dlr MediaTek based player does much better plus you going to have a “great thing” – network card in it , do you know how much network card worth this days – 20dlr in store for a good one.

So unless network features are main thing to get this player you shouldn’t buy it, and if it is – count your money carefully and decide …

Lots of bugs are reported and a number of problems with setting up the Ethernet connection, too. Another big question for me was to know whether there was Mac OS X-software to get the player going as it only ships with a Windows-CD. I did send a polite email to KISS but never got a reply, so much for service! Then I found the JLinkX-page which seems to have precisely what I wanted :

JLink is an application written in Java, donc multi-plateforme qui permet de partager des fichiers vidéos, audios et photos entre un ordinateur et un lecteur DivX de salon Kiss Technology DP500. JLinkX is an application written in AppleScript Studio for launch the Java application JLink without typing commande line.

When I visited the site last december I was able to get hold of the application, but it seems that the download-link is broken today. If you want to have a copy, email me and I’ll send you the .dmg file. Anyway, as JLink is written in Java and has its source-code still available it should not be too difficult to make your own OS X-application from it. In fact, if I find the time I will do so soon as there are some problems with JLinkX anyway (on start-up it gives a warning message which you should ignore etc.). Anyway, this seemed to solve my main problem and against all possible forum-advice I decided to buy a DP-500 mainly to have a project getting it to work over the Christmas vacation. But then I fell sick and it all had to wait a few weeks.

The first impressions on the DP-500 were less negative than I imagined as it could play a DVD as expected as well as any other CD I gave it (CD,CDR,CDRW,i-Photo etc.) but so can any DVD-player these days. However, I didn’t succeed to get its main feature, the ethernet-connection, to work. In fact, I had my doubts for some time that there was an ethernet-card inside at all. Back to the forum for advice. But in the numerous entries on the subject nobody gave precise instructions as to how to connect the computer with the DVD-player : crossed or path cables, router in between or not etc. etc. Anyway, last week I gave it another more patient try and I succeeded to get the DVD-player connected to our network and working! Here is how I managed to do it : I connected the ethernet-port of the player via a patch cable to the LAN-port of the Airport Extreme Base Station. Next you need to get the IP-address of the serving computer and type it in to the DVD-player. Next, create \VIDEO, \AUDIO and \PICTURE folders on the computer and put there the material you want to stream to the player and start-up JLinkX (ignoring the error message). Go back to the DVD-player, select the type of material you want to see, select the file and it all works. It is rather picky about video-formats but there are plenty of free converter programs to get any video you have in the required formats : xvid,dvix4,divx5 or mpeg4. But all this is far from elegant, compared to the squeezebox I described last week. So, if you want to have your videos and i-Photo’s streamed to the living-room TV-set it may be better to wait a little bit longer until other firms bring out ethernet-DVD players, hopefully with Rendezvous support.