Buffalo Technology LinkTheater

Internet

The LinkTheater's Internet capabilities were next on my test list. Since the user interface is a web browser, I found you can send it out to the wide-open Internet to view arbitrary web pages using URLs the LinkTheater server imports from Internet Explorer on your computer. But you shouldn't expect the same web-browsing experience you get on your PC.

Basic web pages displayed well, but even moderately complex pages either failed to display at all or displayed poorly. Like the user interface itself, navigation on a web page is often unintuitive so don't expect this feature to replace your normal web browser. But it might come in handy to quickly check a simple page or two.

Figure 7: Web browsing

Along with Web browsing, the Internet section also has a menu for Internet radio. Unfortunately, in my case, I couldn't get it to work. I'd always get an error indicating "Could not connect to the Internet" even though the box obviously could connect for browsing the web and using Internet Radio stations through the Music sub-menu.

Browsing this forum discussing the LinkTheater revealed this is a problem that others have had as well. It works for some, but not for others. One suggestion of turning off the Windows firewall had no effect for me. I asked Buffalo about the problem and an engineer responded that they don't see the problem in their lab, but they have seen the reports and are looking into it. But in the end, it wasn't a big deal since I could access the radio stations through the Music section.

Update: Buffalo said they've found and corrected this problem in new firmware which is currently in Beta and should be available soon.