Neuston Virtuoso MC-500

MP3s and DivX video will play a huge role in the future of lifestyle entertainment but your PC isn't really where you want to enjoy them--music belongs on your hi-fi and videos are best viewed on the telly. This is why we have devices--such as the Neuston Virtuoso MC-500--which attempt to bridge this digital divide. Like the Linksys wireless media adapter, the Virtuoso MC-500 is a networked entertainment device that streams different types of media throughout the house, allowing you to enjoy Internet movies and digital music on your television or home theater. The MC-500's promise of convenience doesn't end there. With no moving parts, it's less noisy than Media Center PCs, takes up less living room real estate and its slender case and minimalist profile means it fits nicely with the rest of your AV equipment. Sadly, this promising multimedia server is let down by a few major glitches.

Setup And Ease Of Use
The Virtuoso MC-500 comes with everything you'll need to get going: A 3-meter Cat-5 cable, RCA, Scart and S-Video cables, and a fragile-looking remote control. Also included in the package is a small AC adapter along with a setup CD containing drivers and Neuston's media center software. The supplied 12-page quick setup manual isn't the best in terms of layout and presentation; it took us more than a few page flips to figure out how to install and use the device properly.

Once hooked to the TV, the MC-500 can be configured either using wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11b (by inserting compatible adapter into the spare PC Card slot). The Neuston identifies itself on the network by means of an IP address. You can assign a manual address (using peer-to-peer mode) to the device or leave it to a DHCP server to generate the address automatically.

We found the manual input method unpleasantly taxing on the eye: On a small 21-inch TV, text was illegible and we couldn't make out alphabets from numbers each time we tried to key in an IP address. Unless you're connected to large and sharp display, it's best to avoid using this process. For many, the best setup solution is via infrastructure mode, with a router in the network dispensing IP addresses for both PC and the streaming server.

Features
With its wealth of connectivity, you can hook the MC-500 to a computer and a multitude of AV display devices, including LCD, plasma screens, TV and even projectors. The unit is equipped with a single Scart, which is RGB-enabled, and has separate composite and S-Video connections. Dolby Digital and DTS (Digital Theater Sound) surround audio streams are aptly handled through a pair of SPDIF coaxial and optical outputs (though you'll need a separate AV receiver).

The MC-500's remote control is perhaps the package's weakest link, lacking in both look and tactile feel. Plasticky, fragile and dotted with knobby buttons, it's a poor complement to the slickly-conceived MC-500 and lowers the overall pleasure of operating the device. Fortunately, most of the features have dedicated buttons on the remote control--you can change options easily and swiftly navigate around the MC-500's menu.

The Neuston media center software is the middleman that lets your PC talk to the MC-500; it detects where your multimedia inventories are and what files to play. Supported formats include JPEG images, MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis audio plus MPEG-1 and DivX/XviD video but as a prerequisite, you need to have Windows (or OS X for Mac users) as your installed operating system; Linux users are out of luck. The application creates three new directories on the PC by default, one for each digital media. Simply pick whether you want music, pictures or videos and dump them into the appropriate folder; for security reasons, the MC-500 will not browse other folders on your PC apart from these predefined three.

Getting compressed videos off your PC to the big screen is perhaps the most eye-opening experience. In addition to MPEG video, you're limited to files with the AVI (Audio Video Interleave) extension and ones that are encoded using DivX 4 or 5, XviD or ISO MPEG-4. To watch older videos based on the DivX 3 codec, Neuston's media center application re-encodes them to a more compatible format, namely digital video (DV). Unfortunately, this results in more quality-degrading compression and also the total deletion of the original file from your PC.

Performance
Watching your computer's treasure hoard from the MC-500 is commendably easy. All you have to do is hit the menu button and select "images", "audio" or "video" to bring up the file list. Viewing images is the most satisfying of the three--with a good composite RGB connection and a quality screen you should get solid, vibrant images that are as sharp as on any DVD menu. Likewise, music encoded in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format sounded crisp and punchy, limited only by the quality of our amps and speakers.

On the video front: Although the Neuston MC-500 handled most of our DivX and XviD test files, it's clear the final silicon is not entirely bug-free. The main glitch results in lockups each time the server runs an improperly encoded (or corrupted) file from the PC. And fast-forwarding a DivX movie when using Wi-Fi leaves video and audio stuttering and out of sync. That said, when the Neuston does finally get things right, the result is impressive. Given a large screen treatment, well-encoded DivX/XviD files look sublimely gorgeous and not that far off from MPEG-2 DVD quality.