Gateway ADC-320 Connected DVD Player with Wireless 802.11g Card

Gateway is developing a reputation of selling "neat ideas" but quickly abandoning them. My neighbor bought a big screen TV from them and after inumerable service calls, sent it back and got a "real" TV from a "real" manufacturer.

I got this item for Xmas -- unfortunately my wife was not told she needed to get the network adapter card as a seperate item. Now that I want to get the card so I can use it for more than the world's most expensive and least functional DVD player, I find I can not. I just got off of a chat with the Gateway sales rep and he told me to try eBay. Imagine that! What kind of support is that? Good grief, they sold the item, they should support it for a few years, at LEAST.

I have 4 other Gateway computers in the house, including the laptop I'm typing this on. My neighbor has bought SIX of them, due to my suggestion that they are a good company. Now that she has had bad luck with the TV, I think she is also rethinking Gateway.

I would give this product a ZERO star rating but this software does not permit it. All in all, I will avoid Gateway in the future. I can get hardware cheaper and since the Gateway brand no longer means qualty or support, why pay the premium.

Avoid this product at all costs. It's a dead end. And, as another reviewer says, it both freezes while playing movies, and has a frequent seek problem -- if you click on "extras" or something it is likely to go into seek mode for many minutes before it stops and you have to shut it down to start over.

Altogether a really bad product and, apparently now, company.

This player does more or less what it says it's supposed to do, but potential buyers should be aware that this is a "rebranded" product. That is, Gateway does not manufacture it (they don't manufacture anything but PC's as far as I know). It has now been "end of life'd", so the ones on sale are just what's left in the supply chain, no more new ones are being made and Gateway does not sell this item anymore. It has been abandonded by Gateway, so there will be no more software or firmware upgrades. They also don't have any more parts for it, so if you lose your remote control (as I did), it's impossible to get a new one. I can't imagine what a nightmare it would be to get service on it if it breaks.

There are a number of drawbacks to all this, but in the end it's pretty cheap, and even if the "connected" part of it stops working at some point, it's a pretty good plain old DVD player, so if you're thinking of getting a player in the same price range, you may want to spend a few dollars more for the "connected" feature - even if something goes wrong with it, you still have a perfectly good DVD player and haven't lost much money.

But good luck trying to get ANY service or support from Gateway - they just don't want to know about it.

I was interested in this product, but concerned that I couldn't find it on Gateway's web site. I called and asked support and was told it was "no longer being sold" on 21-Nov-04.

Lot of DVD players have the capability of playing MP3s, but having to burn to a CD isn't the most ideal for me since I don't want to have to burn before listening and I have such a varied taste in music. Having the ability to stream music from my PC where all of my MP3s are stored to my home stereo wirelessly made this unit almost worth it solely by itself. One is able to select albums, artists, or playlists. The on screen display is pretty basic and boring (i.e. a few colors with straight lines and square boxes).

With recent firmware upgrades you can even have a picture slideshow (also streamed and one can specify the delay rate and this can occur while playing streaming MP3s).

This unit is basically the same as the ADC-220 from gateway, except it has a newer 802.11g vs. 802.11b network card) -- this helps with the problems people experienced in the past since the bandwidth of 802.11g is about 5x as much as 802.11b (11mb vs 54mb) and 802.11g router/access points are very inexpensive nowadays.

This unit is very similar to the GoVideo D2730 since they both use Digital5 as the PC client software. Current firmware is similar to the new standard for home networking UPnP, but I wasn't able to get MusicMatch's UPnP to work as of yet.

The device supports PAL and NTSC TV formats, so taking advantage of one the of best un-documented and un-supported feature I can play DVDs from the UK (and other regions) that I couldn't on other DVD machines (SETR9). Of course this also plays videos downloaded from the internet or homemovies that are archived on your PC. UK's BBC is starting to provide arhived video that should be supported since this player supports MPEG 1/2/4 and others (Microsoft Media Center, AVI). I haven't used the microphone inputs, but this is a solid DVD performer with 5.1 surround with optical out, component video, etc.

The only negatives are you can't fast forward PC based movies (you can forward to a time, but not like a standard DVD search where the screen speeds through while you watch, of course DVDs with this player search like any other on the market), the remote isn't as sleek as it should be (it's colorful and not very ergonomic -- looks like it was made for the Asian market).

The ADC-320 is about a 1/3 less than the GoVideo one (plus Gateway's comes with the 802.11g card, I believe GoVideo's is a wired version -- they have a new D2740 which has 802.11g). The Philips Streamium looks pretty nice too and that's fully UPnP supportable, but Gateway is still half the price of that one, if not more. This is a solid deal and I am just as happy with it as I was when I bought it about 6 months ago.

Although it is a great concept if it worked, I and others who have bought it have spent all of our time trying to get it fixed. Replaced wireless card, changed IP addresses, and found out it needed software update and now have to send it in because it freezes movies. Since it is past 15 days it is my dime to get it fixed even though it has never worked and I have been calling since day one. Anyway, you make the call, but I think it really needs more time in development - the price you pay for being an early adopter!