Dig around on the internet and you'll soon turn up pages about plugging computers into televisions in order to listen to music and watch DVD movies. Such 'home theatre PCs' are getting popular but until manufacturers start selling computers with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition, the only way to get one is to build one yourself. You could approach the problem from the opposite direction though, and buy the KiSS DP-500 - a DVD player that works like a PC.

The DP-500 looks like one of the £99 DVD players you'd find on the shelves of your local supermarket but at £300, there's obviously more to it than just movies. Its movie playback performance compares favourably with other £100 players but it's needlessly crippled by its single SCART socket. This means that you can't daisy-chain other devices through it if your TV doesn't have enough SCART sockets of its own. The SCART does output an RGB signal though - essential for getting a high-quality picture from DVD movies.

As with other DVD players, the DP-500 plays audio CDs but it can also cope with trickier CD-RW and DVD-RWs. Better still, not only can it play discs containing MP3s but it can also play those carrying MPEG-4 and DivX video. So if you download videos from the internet or produce your own in either of these formats, you can record them on a disc and watch them on TV.

The ace up the DP-500's sleeve, however, is its built-in network port. Plug the player into a PC's network port or a home network and you can view still pictures and movies and listen to MP3s from the PC on the TV.

Setting up the DP-500 on a network is simple enough - just run the supplied software on the PC and the player takes care of the rest. You can then browse through your music, videos and photos on your PC and pick ones to view. This all works surprisingly well too, although the player did crash rather often - something that ordinary DVD players don't do. Its software can be updated from the internet though, so this isn't a major concern.

Contact: Kiss
www.kiss-technology.com