MediaLink for Mac

User Reviews

• great but could "easily" be perfect

  ballerinja11/16/2010

  Pros

  relatively reliable, straight forward interface

  Cons

  needs to add a search function or a scrollable alphabet. getting through tons of media just buy scrolling is annoying.

  Summary

  great product. a solution that was very much needed to link itunes to your ps3 for those of us who use the ps3 as a media center and itunes as our main media library. could certainly use a more clever way to get at your files more quickly than "select-scroll-select-scroll" and so on. but im glad the product exists

  ---

• Buggy software, poor support

  Mike-in-tosh3/14/2010

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />The software does what it says, it delivers media to your PS3, but that is about it. Non-PS3 devices seem to be unsupported and may not work. For example, my Samsung TV supports DLNA and it can see the MediaLink offering, but cannot play any of the media offered by the program. Installation couldn't be easer as it is a simple Preference Pane. Be aware that it appears to be a 32-bit preference pane so if you're running in 64-bit mode, that may cause you issues. Accessing the settings makes sense and it is fairly easy to figure out what each option is. This is good, because there is no documentation or help file associated with the product. The current version appears to suffer from a substantial memory leak. This can be observed by watching your system's overall memory usage as well as monitoring the system messages in the Console.app. Turn off the program through the switch on the preference pane appears to stop the leak, but the memory is not freed until a reboot is performed. If left on the product will lock-up your Macintosh (I'm running 10.6.2). Support for this issue as well as for questions about the product appear to be non-existent. Several emails via the company's "revamped and streamlined" website have gone unanswered. As much as I wanted to like this software, it suffers from a pretty substantial memory leak and very poor customer support - both of which lead to end-user frustration. With all of the free DLNA server software available, it is difficult to recommend this product.

  ---

• great multimedia software for the PS3!

  surfpa783/9/2010

  Pros

  streams my itunes music, iphoto pics, and all movies from my mac book pro, and network drives.

  Cons

  there is a small lag when changing songs.

  Summary

  I am a mac user and was looking for a cheaper solution to purchasing an apple tv or the mac mini to hook up to my TV. I have plenty of movies, pics, and itunes music that I would like to play on my TV through my home theater, but did not want to spend at least $300 to do so. I found this software and tried the free 30 minute trial and was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was to set up. It will play just about any movie format. I also use the apple time capsule as a share drive in my home and I am even able to access the movies, pics, and movies from that. This is the best $20 I have spent in a long time! The software will go great with an upgraded hard drive for your PS3. I just upgraded my 60GB drive to 640GB in a matter of minutes. Now I have the ultimate media storage system.

  ---

• Nothing will hang your Mac faster!!

  chuckbox70-garbage3/8/2010

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I have been using Medialink since 2008 and have enjoyed it, but the quality of each new version is lower than the last. I give them credit for their effort to transcode on the fly, allowing me to stream from many different source formats, but they lost quality control along the way. The last few versions either crash regularly, or as with version b7 completely hang my iMac. I cant think of another application i have EVER run that has had this effect. Normally a program that becomes unresponsive can be killed in the activity monitor, or forced to quit, but Medialink stops the whole machine, filling the console log with messages (one or more per second) and forcing me to hold the power button to shutdown the machine. MediaLinkHelper[120] *** -[NSConcreteData initWithBytes:length:copy:freeWhenDone:bytesAreVM:]: absurd length: 18446744073709551615, maximum size: 9223372036854775808 bytes MediaLinkHelper[120] *** -[NSConcreteData initWithBytes:length:copy:freeWhenDone:bytesAreVM:]: absurd length: 18446744073709551615, maximum size: 9223372036854775808 bytes I would advise you not to purchase this version of the software until they get this sorted out. Oh, and yes i have contacted them via their website (3 times now) and received no response or even a conformation of my request. OSX 10.6.2

  ---

• Worked fine before 10.6

  tgbauer2/6/2010

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />All the versions I've tried with 10.6 are not reliable (using a PS3). Stable release runs well under 10.5 and I wish it was available for 10.6. Real-time transcoding doesn't work on all systems - There should be a way to turn it off, but there isn't! Rivet is the best alternative I've tried (and you can try it out before you buy). PS3MediaServer is a good free one, but doesn't have as much Mac integration. It is written in Java which is good for cross-platform compatibility (runs on MacOS, Linux, Win, etc.), but doesn't perform as well.

  ---

• Buggy, broken and no support

  Attaboy1/15/2010

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Like another user, I found this version extremely buggy and crash-prone. 2.0b4, the previous, worked better but still had significant problems. I've emailed the developers many times and never received a response -- they offer no support at all.

  ---

• Great product!

  Paul F 769/14/2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've been using Nulriver MediaLink for about 2 months now. Installation was easy and trouble free, and once installed it just worked with my PS3 - no messing around needed. It plays all of my music, including DRM-protected songs bought from the iTunes Store, and shows the album art on the screen. It gives access to playlists, including those generated by the new 'Genius' facility. The only criticism I have is it could be easier to select a specific song - they are alphabetical and it takes a while to scroll to something in the middle of the alphabet, but I think that's down to the interface Sony have provided on the PS3 rather than MediaLink. Viewing photographs works fine, although it is a bit on the slow side. I found Elgato EyeConnect works faster, however it doesn't support iPhoto Events. Medialink does support events, so it's easy to find photos if you've got a large number like me. I get round the speed by pressing the 'next' button as soon as the photo loads, and usually by the time it has loaded I've finished looking at the last photo. I haven't tried playing movies, so can't comment on that. The software gives an alert that there's an update available when you open it (via system preferences), and links to the website to download the new version. One of the new versions didn't work and I had to roll-back to the previous version, but that's the only problem I've had. If I log into the mac as myself, I get access to my music / photos on the PS3, and if we log in as another user we get access to their content instead. My wishlist for the product is to stream internet radio to my PS3, I did find a product that allows this (not from Nulriver) but it was a program for techies not end users! Overall, I'd say if you want easy to use media-streaming for your PS3, MediaLink is well worth the money.

  ---

• Doesn't work, support nonexistent

  offmango8/21/2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I have never been able to get this to properly play mp4 files or mp3 files from my iTunes library over my wireless network. Did a great deal of research and found a great deal of people having the same issue. I submitted multiple support requests, but never heard anything back. Don't waste your money.

  ---

• Great Software

  9us3gg7/26/2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I came to this after I got frustrated with EyeConnect. EyeConnect is decent, but the developers take sooo long to update it--there were numerous bugs in it that never got fixed for months. MediaLink, on the other hand, is updated constantly. Great software, great price, and (so far) a great company. Keep it up guys.

  ---

• Great App!

  msmitka17/26/2008

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I have experienced only one instance (in an earlier version) the app continuously gobbling memory, but after stopping it and re-starting it, all was well. Otherwise, MediaLink has worked flawlessly on my Core Duo iMac for months, and has turned added even more value to my PS3.

  ---