Just wanted to share a little knowledge and, perhaps, spare you a little heartache.

First of all, once I got it working, my wife and I fell in love with our MediaLounge DSM-520. It plays most file formats that we have encountered and it’s our favorite method of watching TV shows. I’ll often rip a whole season of a series to the hard disc and then we watch it when we want without having to hunt for a DVD.

However, getting it to work was a problem.

My media computer is upstairs and the big TV is downstairs, so I chose to use a wired connection (everyone said the video would be too choppy with wireless, so I didn’t even try it).

I installed the D-Link software on my Acer, but the Acer already had a media server on it, and try as I might, I couldn’t get the two to work properly. I finally had to shut down the D-Link server (this was after I spent an hour online with the free tech support, which is obviously run out of India).

I tried (and discarded) the following alternate servers:
- TwonkyVision
- Nero Ultra 7
- Windows Media Player 11

All this process took about a month and I was about to give up. But as I discarded Windows Media Player 11 and rolled it back to version 10, I suddenly got it working!

Don’t know why, nor do I care. I’m very pleased with the MediaLounge and, now that it’s finally connected, I couldn’t be happier!