First impressions are of a dull an uninspiring silver box, but perhaps this is unfair as Netgear want to blend the MP115 into the living room and in that respect they have done well as this unassuming unit sits well next to your telly and even goes without the LCD screen of its little brother.

The Netgear MP115 doesn't need a screen as its relies on being hooked to a TV or plasma / LCD for you to see the user interface and its a simple if again Dull corporate interface in Netgear "blue", using the supplied remote our first task was to get the MP115 onto our 128bit WEP wireless network.

Using DHCP and the on screen entry this was achieved with minimal fuss and from the rest of the PC network we could see the Netgear and it could see us, great so next time to load up the server software. As with every multimedia serving device we've tried there is always some branded server software to sit on your central PC or as is the case in the Lordpercy.com office on our music server.

Again this loaded without drama and then required us to point it in the direction of our media files, for this review music was easy with 26gb of music on the machine and we created a few directories of video and images to test out the multimedia aspects of the Netgear.

So far so good, after about and hour of the server software chugging away and several cups of tea later all of our content had been indexed by the server software and could now be browsed from the TV screen, this was all going a bit too smoothly.

Time to play a track, having selected a bit of U2 from the server we hit play and after a brief pause the dulcet tones of Bono came from our LCD screens speakers, cool, but wait it then started to stutter and stall not at all like the MP101 we tested before. We tried more tracks and found the same result it would lay for a while and then as if running out of buffering would start to stutter, after trying many things we did a bit of googling and found that some Netgear products had been effected by software firewalls.

So time to switch off Zone alarm and see if that made a difference, we had already allowed the server application full access rights in the "trusted zone" but once ZA was fully disabled the tracks played in their entirety without stuttering.

We haven't got to the bottom of why the MP115 would have such an adverse reaction to the normally inoffensive Zone Alarm firewall but we had to proceed with the Music server effectively open to the outside world (although our broadband router has a firewall inside).

There are many ways to view your media using the on screen display but perhaps the worst is to view all tracks, which just gives you a huge scrollable list, instead better to view by album or artists, of course you have to have your collection organised in this way which may be a downside from some.

Selecting a  track starts playback and the on screen display gives you a rather dull Netgear corporate background with the song title and details or you can get associated album art which is far more attractive, after about 5 minutes the screensaver kicks in with a bouncing Netgear logo.

So in terms of audio its on a par with the Netgear Mp101 so time to try out some of the multimedia functions, Netgear claim that the new MP115 will work with MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, MP3 (up to 320kbps), Windows Media Audio (WMA8 and WMA 9), WAV, M3U, PLS, and streaming MP3 formats.

We didn't have the time or the media to test all of these but its fairly quick to test the image files and sure enough it can navigate your image library showing all our digital camera JPEG's and some Giff files too, again the server software transmits the folder structure so you have to be organised in order to find the image you want. Perhaps one day we'll get a search facility which would be pretty cool?

So onto video and the real test as to why you would pay more for the new MP15 than the audio only MP101, first up some MPEG 2 AVI files we've used to test all sorts of gadgets and after a brief buffering period they appeared on screen in reasonable quality with our stuttering or spluttering in fact quite a convincing replay, the same was true for our MPEG 1 files but neither of these formats should make the MP115 struggle.

Instead we decided to enter the dark and incompatible world of MPEG 4 and Divx, again the same files we tried to get some portable media players to work with. First up MPEG 4 again encoded as AVI as the Netgear won't play ball with Apples QuickTime, despite all out attempts we couldn't get these files to play perhaps it was our encoded bit rate of 512kbps and 1mbits or even the resolution but either way no joy.

With great trepidation we navigated the Netgear interface to a Divx 4 file we had downloaded some time ago and pressed play, after what seemed like an eternity the file actually started to play with audio in sync and quite good quality. This was quite a result until we realise the whole unit had locked up and now wouldn't do anything without a power cycle, oh well maybe we were just counting our chickens too soon, of course the good news is that your ripped DVD's will play.

Perhaps the most impressive feat was that all of these tests were done over the wireless link, we didn't have to resort to the baled RJ45 interface and managed to watch a whole movie with only minor audio splats using a link which showed about 50% strength.

This Good wireless performance is  in part due to the dual 2dbi antenna used in the Netgear MP115 which seems to be very good at holding signal even through a few walls in the office. We didn't get time to play with Netgear's interface to internet radio but then this works fine on the MP101 so we have no reason to doubt it will work just as well on the MP115.

Its a shame the problems with Zone Alarm cast a doubt over this offering from Netgear it would otherwise be a very positive review, sure some of the video formats are a little tricky to get working but that's true of every unit we ever test and that aside the MP115 is a competent if not exciting unit.

As a progression of the MP101 this unit is a logical upgrade or next step for anyone with a growing collection of ripped DVD's or MPEG files, we'd have preferred Netgear to have kept the LCD screen on the front panel but its understandable why they want to make the unit as inconspicuous as possible.

For now we'll give the Netgear MP115 a thumbs up, its a good effort and one of the best we've seen, we just hope that users and Netgear can find a way round some of the issues with software firewalls which are already in operation on so many PC's.

Published - 25/03/2005

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