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A DVD player you say? Yes, the Kiss DP-500 is a DVD player, which might not be the kind of product you’d expect TrustedReviews to have a look at, but this is no ordinary DVD player. This is the ultimate DVD player for anyone with a broadband connection as it can play DVD, VCD, SVCD, DivX (all formats), XviD, mp3 and more.

Kiss is a Danish company that has been around for a good few years now and I remember some of its earlier products that didn’t take off as there was too much competition in the market space that Kiss was addressing. But since Kiss introduced the DP-330 it has become a brand that’s synonymous with home DivX players. There is now a wide range of players available and the DP-500 is positioned towards the top of that range.

In the past few months HTPCs or Home Theatre PCs have become very popular, especially with the launch of Windows Media Center Edition. It’s no surprise that this type of machine is popular since it offers the functionality of many devices in one box. But the DP-500 can do many of the things that an HTPC can do without being a PC. There are however a couple of requirements for this to work; the most important being that you already have a PC somewhere in your home. You also need to have a network configured or at least be willing to set one up.

You see, the DP-500 has a built in network card and is capable of streaming data from a PC, be it video, music or pictures. You do need to have some basic networking knowledge to get it all up and running, but you don’t have to have a computer science degree to figure it out. It is however helpful if you have a router with DHCP support enabled, which will leave you with less configuration to do.

But before I delve any deeper into the streaming functionality of the DP-500 let’s have a look at what it is capable of as a standalone unit. As with the lower spec DP-450 which lacks the network capability, the DP-500 allows for playback of most formats from CD or DVD media. This means that you can play standard DVDs, CDs, mp3 CDs, VCDs, SVCDs, DivX and XviD (MPEG 4) on CD, but there is also support for rarer formats such as Ogg-Vorbis. You can also burn jpeg images to a CD and play those back.

The DP-500 offers all the functionality of a standard DVD player and there is a wide range of options for connecting it to your TV and home cinema setup. Around the back you’ll find a SCART socket as well as S-Video and composite video outputs. There are two RCA connectors for stereo audio output as well as coaxial and optical S/PDIF outputs. The only format missing here is component video, which might not be an issue for most of us, but if you own a high-end TV or a projector, component is the preferable way of connecting it up. According to the manual, you can use a SCART to component video cable to resolve this issue, but these are fairly hard to track down and you’re not really getting the benefit of three high-quality discrete cables to transport the image. The final port at the rear is, of course, the 10/100Mbit Ethernet port, which I’ll come back to later.

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