By Terry Peterson

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One of the most exciting things about the AVeL Link Player is the possibility of accessing your saved HDTV program files in full HD resolution remotely from your (perhaps noisy) HTPC.  You can do this with the Link Player in two ways—over your local network or by saving the files to DVD.

1.  Playing HDTV files over the LAN: 

You can play ordinary MyHD and FusionHDTV hard disk capture files on the AVeL Link Player by making them accessible to it via a “server”.  The Link Player comes with a setup CD-ROM that includes such a server for Windows PCs, called the AVeL LinkServer  The LinkServer installation and use is described on the IO-DATA website here:  http://www.iodata.com/usa/products/AVLP2_Setup2.php  

Once you’ve installed and started LinkServer, you can access and play your saved HDTV HDD files over your LAN by choosing them from a list—with one catch—until IO-DATA updates the LinkPlayer firmware to recognize “.tp” files, you need to rename your files from “xxx.tp” to “xxx.ts” for them to show up in LinkServer  (Note to IO-DATA: Please update LinkServer to recognize that “.tp” files are the same as “.ts” files!)   

Final tip on LinkServer: You’ll probably want to define the folder(s) where you normally keep your HDTV files as a “watch” folder for LinkServer, so that you can browse to them easily from the AVeL Link Player’s menu, rather than explicitly defining play lists.  

OK, cool as it is to play HDTV “.ts” files over the LAN with the HTPC in another room, renaming all your “.tp” files is not very convenient if you have many of them.  So, isn’t there a better way?  Yes, a more convenient method is to use the Advanced AVeL Server, which you can find, along with installation instructions, here:  http://www.iodata.com/usa/products/AVLP2_Setup4.php   

Unfortunately, the Advanced Server also doesn’t recognize “.tp” files out of the box. But it does allow you to modify its configuration to add them to its lists without a name change.  Here’s how:   

1. Open in WordPad, the file “server-config.xml”.  This file is in the following folder:
   C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\
   I-O DATA DEVICE,INC\AVeL Link Advanced Server 
2. Find in the file, the following line: 
   <mediaFile extension=".ts" /> 
3. Add immediately after that line the following one: 
   <mediaFile extension=".tp" fake=".ts" resumable="yes" />  
4. Save the file (after making a security copy of the original).
5. Restart Windows and your Link Player server menus will show and play .tp files.

Note:  Both LinkServer  and the Advanced Server support “Wake on LAN” (WOL) so that you can configure your server PC to hibernate or standby when it's inactive and the AVeL Link Player will wake the server up when you attempt to access its files.

Note on H2M (HDTVtoMPEG2) edited files:  The popular free TS editor, H2M, makes quick cuts from files for deleting unwanted segments.  However, most H2M cut points introduce a playback glitch and/or lip-sync mismatches in Link Player’s play using the current (12/05) firmware.  [Note to IO-DATA:  Please fix this in the next firmware release!].  One way around this issue is to use the (not free) editor VideoReDo instead.  

2.  Playing HDTV files from CD/DVD ROM: 

Just save your file to a CD or DVD recordable disk, remembering to use a ".ts" file name extension.  Optionally, you can strip null packets from the file (using H2M, for example) to save space on the disk.  (Note:You need to use "UDF" format to write files larger than 4 GB on a DVD).  When you put the disk into the player, it will present on screen a menu of the files on the disk, if there are more than one, to select for play.  (Note:  It’s probably not a good idea to record your files in segments, since each segment appears in the menu list and plays separately.  Perhaps IO-DATA will address this and the lack of “.tp” file support on DVD in a future firmware update)