I mentioned the Qcast Tuner in my last update, but feel the need to expound on it. A while ago asked me about if he should buy it or not. I told him it wasn’t ready for prime-time, and I’ll explain why.
It doesn’t “just work.” I’m not talking about network configuration, or server configuration or any of that. When dealing with home networking and trying to get your PS2 to play media files off of your computer, a certain technical challenge is expected, even anticipated in some cases I’m talking about the fact that there are a hundred places that it isn’t refined.
It takes upwards of 2 minutes to get started, which sucks when you just want to listen to a song or show a friend a video. You can’t fast forward or rewind songs. You can’t sort your songs by the track number in the ID3 tag. You can’t make plugins for the server (which would make my audioscrobbler stats a lot more accurate). There’s a lot of you can’ts, not a lot of you cans.
One of the most attractive features of the Qcast is its ability to play DivX movies, which I’m told you can download from P2P networks. Sadly, the Tuner doesn’t have a very forgiving decoder and crashes on about half of the DivXs that I’ve downloaded.
My recommendation is that if you encode your own DivXs, or just want an easy way to get your MP3s from your computer to your stereo, and you already own a PS2 network adapter, then consider the Qcast after reading the forums. Otherwise, there are better and easier ways to get your MP3s on your stereo.