A revolution has taken place in our living rooms: While it took the CD ten years to conquer the market, the DVD achieved the same feat in half the time. In parallel to DVD players' remarkable growth, the number of formats has also risen: besides MPEG-2 for DVD video, MPEG-4/DivX and the MPEG Layer 3 audio format (MP3) are also highly popular.

However, the question begs to be asked whether or not DVD is really the best medium to manage and replay large quantities of audio and video data.

The question is inevitable, as more and more consumer devices throw an integrated network interface into the bargain to enable the user to call up material for playing from elsewhere in the network or the Internet. That is important when MP3 collections or film archives consisting of dozens of MPEG-4 titles far outstrip the holding power of a DVD.

We got down to brass tacks in our labs with four completely different representatives of playback devices. Because it would have exceeded the bounds of this article, we decided not to consider recording devices.

The first candidate is a customary DVD player from NorthQ that can also play back MPEG-4 videos (DivX). Candidate two is again a DVD player, from Denmark's KiSS Technology, whose integrated network interface sets it apart.

The third member of the pack is the c300 from cd3o, which hooks up to a Windows computer wirelessly or via a 100 Mbit LAN to transfer audio files to a Hi-Fi speaker system. And, last but not least, we decided to include Microsoft's XBox, which, thanks to a few tweaks, really is all-singing, all-dancing. Let's roll...