Continued

Next, I turned my attention to the mini. When I powered the mini on, a message appeared on my TV: "Now downloading the firmware..." (see Figure 4). Along with this message I noticed a lot of activity on the network LED.

Figure 4: Boot Message

It appeared as if the mini was booting by acquiring a firmware image from the network. To test this theory out, I unplugged the network cable and tried again. Sure enough, it failed. So this tells me that to even turn the mini on, you need to have either a PC running with Buffalo's server, or a Buffalo NAS device on the net so firmware can be uploaded. Once the mini successfully booted, an initial menu screen was displayed, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Main Menu

There were only a few settings available under Settings: network settings could be changed, the screensaver timeout could be modified, and the amount of time pictures were displayed during a slideshow could be set as well. The "DLNA server" is designed to allow access to any DNLA servers located on the local LAN. The "Buffalo MediaServer" option allows access to servers on the LAN that use the proprietary "PCast" protocol by Buffalo.

Buffalo's own server supports both the DLNA standard and the proprietary PCast protocol. While it may seem strange to simultaneously support both, it appears as if Buffalo is straddling the fence a bit when it comes to standards. DLNA is built on top of the UPnP standard; my experience with various devices that support UPnP is that you get a fairly basic level of functionality with bland user interfaces. The PCast protocol used by Buffalo allows more features and a richer user interface.