Setting Up

Since I'm lucky enough to have a network drop in my entertainment center, hooking the unit up was just as easy as plugging in network and A/V cables. By default, the unit acquires an IP address via DHCP, so if you have a DHCP server on your network, no configuration is required. If you don't have a network drop handy, you'll have to rig up a wireless bridge or something similar.

Buffalo supplies a media server to run on your PC. I installed it, but my main interest in these types of devices is use in conjunction with a media server running on an NAS device. Using a low-powered, low-noise storage device means that I don't need to have a computer running just to listen to music or watch a slide show.

To test it in this mode, Buffalo supplied me with a "Home Server" version of their popular Linkstation NAS. I won't review the Linkstation Home Server in detail, because except for the media serving capabilities, it's the same device reviewed in an earlier article. But to get started, and to get some content to the mini, I plugged the Linkstation into my LAN, powered it on, and explored it a bit.

Figure 3 shows the main menu from the Linkstation that deals with media serving. The basic idea is that you select a folder on the Linkstation that will be used for serving media content, then mount that directory from a PC on your LAN, and populate it with media files. Once the server catalogues the media files, they will be available to be served up to a compatible device such as the LinkTheater mini.

Figure 3: LinkTheater DLNA Setup

To test out this process, I mounted the shared directory from my Apple iBook and populated it with several movie files, several MP3 files from my iTunes directory, and a number of photos from my iPhoto directory. Once I had done this, I hit the "Refresh" button shown in Figure 3, just to make sure that the media server had seen my new files.