Buffalo Technology PC-P4LWAG Digital Multimedia Receiver

Don't buy this product

By Vlad  Sep 6, 2007

Pros: Can play some video files wirelessly

Cons: Freezes, buggy firmware, incorrect resolution, no subtitles, awful support

Ok, this is my first review ever and it's for the product which could've been great and failed miserably. I feel passionately disappointed by the whole package. And let me explain why.

The task was simple - I wanted to play videos from my computer which is around 15 meters away from my HDTV. I've browsed around and after reading a positive review from CNET decided to buy the Buffalo Wireless A&G.

I was supposedly making an educated choice based on professional reviews, but the problems with the unit started as soon as I started the installation.

Here's the list of things that are bad about the unit:

1. The set freezes ever so often to refresh the folders from my computer and it takes sometimes a 2-3 minutes to open a directory with 20 files. Why it does that - I don't know.

2. The supplied Media Center software does not work in Vista. A Vista internal media center needs to be used, there's no documentation from Buffalo how to set it up.

3. The set does not support subtitles (srt / sub) although in the CNet review it states that they are supported.

4. There is no scan/pan/zoom options and the set fails to recognize the correct aspect ratio for wide-screen movies. That means that for 50% of the movies your screen will be distorted, and usually this cannot be corrected by changing the TV resolution.

5. The set does not play 10% of the standard XVid / DivX encoded movies. Why - I have no idea. Also, for some reason for additional 5-10% of movies the playback is choppy. I suspect it's not the wireless, but the codecs in the unit which do not always work good.

6. The buffering does not always work well. There's no internal hard drive nor a sizeable memory chip where a movie can be pre-loaded to play without glitches.

7. Annoyingly the set would sometimes freeze and it might take 2-3 times switching it off (!) to bring it to life. It also freezes after leaving it "on" during the night and often does not respond to "power on" command when you try to switch it on.

8. The set's IR sensor mistakes my Philips HD TV remote commands as its own and start do wild things.

9. Remote really does not work well and sometimes it takes 2 pushes of a button to get any response, while sometimes a single push results in 2 commands.

10. Finally, there are no plans for firmware upgrades and support is really slacking - I've received a reply to my complaint 1 month after sending it. Even more - their web site crashed when I tried to used the webform (great way to reduce the number of complaints by crashing the website when user clicks "Send")
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Summary: So, this was a product with potential but software bugs make it unusable in 50% of the cases at the very least. Lack of support means that you should just shop elsewhere.