[philzgr8]

OK so my DMA2200 saw service for the first time last night and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The setup went without a hitch and findings are as below:

Setup:
This was very straightforward although it didn't go exactly as the manual suggested which was a little disconcerting. Perhaps it was because I had the MCE interface running on my MCE box when I ran setup on the DMA2200 but (not being a great one for reading instructions) I wasn't aware that I needed to shut it down. In any case it immediately prompted me to set up the extender when I was expecting to have to run the install disk first. Anyway it set itself up and appeared to be fine but I decided to run the install disk anyway to be sure to be sure. I was also expecting to have to download some updates from WindowsUpdate but when I ran it there were no updates to install. (Note: It's possible that the fact I have SP1 RTM installed may account for this behaviour.)

The extender's setup menu was very straightforward and there was nothing in there of concern.

Appearance/Interface.
I must say I was quite surprised by the shape of this unit. Most similar devices I would expect to be wide and shallow but the DMA2200 is the opposite. It is quite narrow and surprisingly deep so that the front panel is very compact. Of course this could present something of an issue if you had a very shallow cabinet to put it in but I'd be surprised if anyone had an issue with it. Height wise it is comparable to your average stand alone DVD player.

From everything I saw the interface is virtually identical to MCE and most things just worked although it does have an annoying habit of scanning media folders each time I go to My Videos etc and prompting me to continue. I'm hoping that this annoyance goes away as on occasions I found that clicking OK would not dismiss the prompt for a couple of minutes. Interestingly, despite having been prompted to have access to watched folders from my MCE machine I still had to add them manually. Once added they worked as expected. Note that I have not resolved how to access shares on a windows machine but NAS shares (WD MyBook World - Linux) just worked.

Menu animations seem a touch jerky (a bit like micro stutter) but all in all they are fairly easy on the eye. Interestingly, without the ability to set any scan options on my 26" Samsung, I did find that with video files at least (and probably everywhere else too) there is definitely overscan and nowhere to make any compensation. I suspect that a panel with 1:1 pixel mapping would quickly resolve this issue but it's no big deal for a bedroom TV.

With the exception of the DivX incompatibility the streaming of media was absolutely fine. There was no evidence of any network issues and the units own netwok test indicated that I had 100% of the required bandwidth for streaming HD content.

The DVD interface, while somewhat annoyingly not intigrated with the MCE interface works pretty much the same as any DVD player and it will be handy for watching the occasional movie which isn't ripped to the NAS.

I have yet to tackle MyMovies and I must admit I'm not filled with confidence. The truth is I suspect MyMovies uses drive mappings for locating its content and it seems the DMA2200 only sees UNC's. Even if I do manage to resolve that little glitch, I may have to change the format of ripped DVD folders to a supported video format such as Xvid, MPEG or WMV as I think I read that these units won't stream DVD folder content. Time will tell.

I have still to check which plug-ins will work with the extender but I don't generally use them so there's no big hurry for me. I will report back once I've had time to do some testing. I guess I'll have to download a few to see what they're like.

Overall
Well with the benefit of only a short while playing with it last night I'd have to say it's well worth the $330 I paid for it and it is very quiet. This was a must for the bedroom. As far as I'm concerned I'd happily recommend it to anyone who has been holding off but to be fair, I guess I'd be a bit concerned if all of my media was stored somewhere on a 3rd party windows machine as I have not yet found a way to access windows shares.