Comparison of Xbox 360 Extender and Linksys Extender
Do’s do, and un-boxing of the DMA2200 Linksys extender. Before I disconnected the Linksys 2100 the DMA2100, I thought I run a comparison side by side with XBox360 to see if there’s any features that one has over the other, and would benefit one way or the other. So, to give you an idea what I’ve got connected up here now is my regular XBox360 connected up over the LAN to my media center PC, as I normally do, and on top of that, I got the Linksys, on top of that I got a Linksys DMA2100 extender connected via the wireless. I haven’t got two cables down there, so ones going to be well as ones got to be connected up by via wireless, so that’s the way I’ve done it. Anyway, so, any wires issues I’ll point out. But first I thought we’ll have a look at the video quality and the screen quality. There’s a difference, the XBox360 is connected up via VGA cable wherein, well, we’ll check the resolution in a moment, but it’s just around 720p. The Linksys is running at via HDMI cable at 1080i. The XBox360 connected via optical cable to my AVVC receiver and the Linksys is via coaxial, coaxial digital cable. But I’m not going to be testing the audio, because obviously through the camera, that’s not going to be picking that much up, and I found there’s a huge amount of difference, but I will explain those as it come along. So, my TV behind me, I’m going to flick between the sources, so you’re going to see the regular TV source, as the extender, and as the XBox360. So, I’m going to do now is show you how these are set up and then we’ll show some of the pictures. Okay, so down there you can see the XBox360, the Linksys DMA2100 on top of it and next to that is my audio kit. So that’s pan back up and here’s my Sony TV, so let’s try and fix the camera there, okay. I will get the remote controls, so I put the information button here, so this bring through, says PC on there, it’s my XBox360, it’s running 1280 by 768 at 60 hertz and although 60 hertz, you can probably see the slight flick on the video. I’m here in the UK, we run at 50 hertz. The XBox360 in HD mode will only run at 60 hertz. So you will notice some difference with some of the content. I’m going to try some HD content and some regular TV content as well. Okay, so the next input I’ve got here, let me send this sound down to is, the camera going to refocus, this is the Linksys. And I actually, it’s a different shade of blue and it can’t quite work out which looks better, I think the XBox360 looks more subtle. This is slightly brighter, coz it’s HDMI, and we’re running at 1080i, 50 hertz, and still see, I see some flick here in the camera here, but there is no flicking when you look at that on the. Okay, let’s go to, back to the XBox360, XBox360, notice it’s a bit dull and I normally turn the contrast up a little bit. But I’ll turn it back down to work with the, with the Linksys unit. So, there’s my transition between menus, very smooth, I’m going to recorded TV, and turn this information off there. You can see there, very smooth animation, I’ll pick a show. You can see that, we’ll going to play that. You can see, skipping and forwarding, nice and smooth. Go back, go back to main menu, scroll right way back. You can even go to the guide, and see that, very smooth, very nice. Okay, so it looks very nice, that’s the XBox360, let’s flick over to the Linksys. So now, you’ll notice, the menu transitions aren’t quite as smooth, still work, but it’s not quite as smooth. I’m going to recorded TV, and I think I expect this to be slightly slow coz the network, now you can see. It’s a little bit more jolty, but not much. Now, I can pick up the same show I was watching before, the nice thing is actually if you have XBox in one room and the Linksys in another room, you can just carry on watching it in your room, so, you can watch it off in 360 in your living room and you go up stairs and you watch it in your bedroom, you can pick up and just carry off where you left off, I really like that feature. Now, you see, the picture quality, and I think looks like it’s better now, this shooting at 50 hertz, 50 hertz content on 50 hertz extender, suppose 50 hertz then can be converted to 60 and I think that looks more like TV. If I flick this back on to normal DVT through Sony built in tuner, you can see there, now move this back to the Linksys extender, it’s actually smooth. So I think the picture looks pretty good, and in fact it almost looks better, but then when you come back to the menu, I don’t think this looks quite as good. Now, let me try and find something fast moving just to see if we can test what the frame rate looks like. Oh, look at that. Let’s see some action track on, on track action. Nice and smooth, okay. So, let’s just stop that, go back to the XBox. Of course we use the same content now, now this is running at 60 hertz now, it’s 50 hertz content, 60 hertz video. And although you can see it on here, let me try and get some more track action. You really can’t tell too much, to be honest now, sometimes you can really tell, so that’s video playback. Let’s have a look at some HD playback now. Okay, this is 1080i content, being stream over the network now, so let’s just double check there settings on that, yeah, 1080i. I think this actual content is 720p. I downloaded from Windowsmedia.com, looks pretty good. Let’s go on same thing now, okay, let’s try that now, now this is running over the, on the network so this doesn’t, but really you can’t tell much difference. And again, we’ll check the spec now. We’re running it in 1280 by 768, 60 hertz. So again, not really much difference on that, both look pretty good. I say, the Linksys looks slightly better. So that’s a complete, a quick comparison between the Linksys DMA2100 and the XBox360. I think the XBox360 does look better with the transitions, going from menu to menu, and smoother, for example, when I was flicking through recorded TV, it was really flick plastic on the Linksys device where as a mere sensor on the XBox360 is much more responsive. But then again, you’re talking about a bigger unit with a fan in there, the noise it make and its games console as well, not many people want that. I think the combination works pretty well, have your XBox360 in one room, the Linksys in another room and that’s a good way to go. So I’m going to have a look at the DMA2200 next on our future video, thanks for watching this video. Just to show you what controller I’ve been using for this video, I was using the Linksys remote and the XBox360 controller. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you on future video. Bye.