Product Reviews

Even a fairly average home computer is able to play music CDs and DVD movies. Many can even double as a radio and TV. Even so, you'd still think twice about having a great big beige box in your living room. So why not keep all the unsightly noisy, whirring bits in another room, and just put a playback device in the lounge?

Pinnacle's ShowCenter package consists of a box that plugs into your TV set, plus software that you install on your PC. The software searches your computer for music, video and pictures, and catalogues all your media files into lists. These files can then be sent to the box attached to your telly. Cleverly, the software can even convert some media formats that aren't supported by ShowCenter into ones that are. You shouldn't need to use this facility very often, though - the ShowCenter can play all the most popular media files, including MP3 files, and MPEG and DivX video.

In theory, if you have DVD-quality video stored

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on your PC, the ShowCenter will play it on your telly at its full 720x576 resolution, at 25 frames per second. For this to work, however, the set-top box and your PC need to be hooked up using a wired Ethernet connection: the box's wireless link just isn't fast enough. Happily, both a normal network cable and a crossover cable are also supplied. This means the ShowCenter can be attached directly to a PC or via hub or switch. But if your PC is in an upstairs room and your TV downstairs, do you really want cables trailing everywhere? An added disadvantage is the fact that, because of copyright encryption on the discs, the ShowCenter won't even play commercial DVD footage. You'd have to create your own DVD-quality video before you could watch it.

Setup wasn't as smooth as Pinnacle claims, either. The ShowCenter wasn't automatically detected by our PC. In the end we had to go into its advanced settings and assign it a network IP address manually before it could communicate with our computer. On the bright side, once it was detected, the ShowCenter worked flawlessly. Browsing files from the comfort of the couch was no problem using the ShowCenter's simple menus. Both video and audio played without a hitch, and we were even able to watch a VideoCD that was playing in our host PC's CD drive.

Like the Hauppauge MediaMVP that we reviewed in our January issue, the ShowCenter is a brilliant idea that doesn't quite work. For this price, you'd expect perfection. In practice, the ShowCenter has too many limitations for us to recommend it.