The DP-500 designed and brought to market by Scandinavian outfit, KiSS, is an innovative product aimed at home cinema enthusiasts with little or no technical acumen. The fact that this media device comes with built-in networking capability suggests that it was originally designed for information managers on large corporate networks who were looking for an efficient device to sit on the network and to deliver media content to desktops.
Then the goal posts were moved and what with Microsoft’s new found interest in the home media centre and the general interest in the networked home where PC talks to TV, KiSS obviously saw an opportunity. Kiss seem to have envisaged that it would be a good idea to target the early adopters who would embrace a device that would play all sort of digital content and talk to their PC and any other network device they had in their homes. The DP-500 is that device.
Specs-wise, the DP-500 offers 5.1 surround sound, progressive scan for superior-quality DVD playback, and the ability to read the following formats: DIVX, XviD, VCD, MP3/CBR/VBR on CD/DVD, Audio on CD/DVD and photo CD/DVD.
The machine looks like any HiFi component and includes a remote, with batteries thoughtfully provided, plus all the cables and documentation necessary to get up and running in about five minutes. Included also are SCART, s-video and audio connection cables, a CD with the PC software to allow the KiSS player to access a PC’s file system. No network cable is provided, and neither are the cables for digital audio out via the optical or Cinch. A nice addition is a very easy to use front control panel with many of the features represented in case the batteries on the remote give up the ghost at just the wrong moment.
Once connected to your TV and stereo and powered on, the set-up menu presented to the user is simple and easy to follow. Large on-screen icons represent the available answers to each question, and it was a joy to see such an easy installation process. The DP-500 requires a DHCP Server to assign an IP address to it if you wish to stream media to it from your network systems. This is a bit problematic for some if they have never set up a DHCP server before. The online support documentation explains the reason for this as an attempt to keep the set-up procedure simple. It is a bit of an oversight on the part of KiSS as the option to assign the player a private IP address of your own choosing would have been a nice option for those unhappy running DHCP servers. A system you want the DP-500 to browse must have the software installed and the IP address of this system must be given to it through its set-up option, again the documentation was excellent on this area and the file share was up and running in next to no time.
The player was tested using a selection of DVD movies, VCDs, audio CDs, MP3 CD and DVDs, and streamed DivX and MP3 files from a Windows 2000 desktop PC.
Thanks to the progressive scan feature that creates a picture signal with double the scan lines of a conventional DVD player, a higher picture resolution and sharper image quality has been achieved. The resulting DVD playback was good, lacking image artefacts, and in fact was of an obviously sharper image quality when compared side by side with an older big brand name DVD player.
The Audio/Photo CDs, VCDs, MP3 and DivX playback tests were performed by the DP-500 without a hitch. The only caveats being its inability to handle audio CDs with copy protection or videos that have been compressed using DivX codec before version 4. The audio CD copy protection issue may not be too much of a problem for most as anyone buying this unit presumably has a decent HiFi system, but it is a bit troublesome. Brief tests of the Web radio feature and the playback of VBR format files were made and the player continued to show its engineers attention to detail.
Specs
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