The Buffalo LinkTheater (LT-V100), distributed in Australia by Uniden, is a digital media player that enables seamless streaming of digital movies, music and photos, offers networking via Ethernet connection, digital audio output, two USB ports, HDMI and composite video outputs, and has the ability to natively play an enormous array of the latest audio/video formats.

There is, however, no online functionality; the inclusion of Ethernet is for connecting to a LAN.

The LinkTheater’s GUI is a lot more basic than the other players being tested; there is a lot of unused real estate on the screen. However, while it looks like something designed in Apple’s DVD Creator software (no exaggeration, I’ve used this very background), it would prove incredibly accessible to your technology-illiterate clients.

That being said, it took a while to fi gure out the navigation as the menu system displays all of the hidden, read-only fi les present on the external hard drive, which isn’t a problem that is exclusive to Buffalo, it’s just a lot more apparent on this player.

On start-up, the player was defaulted to 480p output. Changing to 1080p was simple enough. After doing this, the image quality was simply fantastic – the colour reproduction is great and the image was scaled to fi t the size of the screen.

But, while the LinkTheater is DTS and Dolby Digital ready, the audio playback for me was the down point – it really was quite soft.

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