The affordable Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player has almost every item on the "perfect media hub" checklist: music, high-definition photos, photos with music tracks, video support, a Web browser, and multisource and multiroom support. Unfortunately, less attention was paid to the setup, interface, and remote control. The result is a well-intentioned product with so many usability issues that its appeal may be limited to the technically savvy.

The Player is a silver box bristling with rear connectors: composite video, S-Video, component video, DVI video, and analog and optical digital audio. Wired Ethernet is also in back, and an Actiontec 802.11b Wi-Fi card comes standard and fits into a PC Card slot on one side. The remote control has 47 buttons, but four are unmarked and appear to have no function; press them and the screen reports Invalid, although you'll get that message with working buttons too if you press them at the wrong time. There's a barebones on-screen display. A few setup functions are controlled from your PC.

For music, the player supports Ogg Vorbis and AAC, in addition to MP3 and WMA. All video formats but WMV are supported. This is a PC-only device (no Mac or Linux). It can't display album art, and the small remote has a mute button but no volume control.

Actiontec's default music setting should be for the blues. That's what you'll be singing from the moment you begin to set up, see three setup buttons, and find you need to run the second step first. If you want to go from music to photos once the Player is running, you can't just press the Photos button: You must first press Stop, then Photos. Also, the remote felt too small in the hand, and music information is skimpy: just artist name and song title.

As with most other products, music transfer was fine. Video transfer was problematic on the supplied Wi-Fi card, but that's more the fault of 802.11b than Actiontec, which doesn't yet support 802.11g, the faster standard. Because of the Player's high-resolution capabilities, you may want to play photos at full resolution and not scale them back to VGA, which some people do when creating a slide show directory.

Compared with the other reviewed products, the Player wins on features and loses on usability. If you want to show photos on an HDTV, the Roku HD1000 (not reviewed here) is more polished, but costs $100 more. For Web browsing, the Player is most similar to the Prismiq MediaPlayer, our Editors' Choice a year ago, but Prismiq's player is easier to use.

The Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player provides a superior set of features. But only choose this product if you're comfortable going one-on-one with cantankerous gadgets.