Testing the new Kiss PC-Link 3.0

Kiss have released PC Link 3.0 for Windows (previous version was 1.30) which I just installed and tried out for the first time. PC-Link is the piece of software that you can use to stream media files from your computer to your Kiss player/recorder. New features include Live Folders and Picture Scaling.

Live folders is adding a folder to PC-Link and whatever updates you do to that folder, ie adding and removing files, will be reflected on your Kiss DP-558 (or whatever player/recorder you have). In previous versions you had to manually update PC-Link whenever you made any changes to a folder.
The first time I tried to play some audio files from a Live Folder my DP-558 hung, but after power off/on it seems to work fine.

Picture Scaling as I understand it lets you choose what format your TV screen is – 4:3 or 16:9 – to scale your pictures to fit the screen. Funny thing is that on my 16:9 TV, when I choose the 16:9 setting it shows as a 4:3 picture and vice versa. When I try to change the setting while showing the picture on my TV screen PC-Link crashes on the PC and gives “an unhandled win32 exception” and when I restart it all settings including the files and folders I’ve added are gone.

Another new feature seem to be the New Folder button which I understand as creating a virtual folder which is only used for presentation in your Player/Recorder, where you can drag and drop folders and files without them actually being moved on your hard drive.

For some reason I couldn’t get an added .wmv video file to even show up on my player but other video formats seem to work fine, I tried vob and avi. And yes, wmv is added as an extension in the extension settings in PC-Link, another new feature which allows you to set what file extensions you wish to make visible to the player.

Be aware that the install program does not remove your old PC-Link 1.30. It removes the icons from the Start menu but does not actually uninstall it, the files are still left on your hard drive and in Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel.

Some previous features seem to have been removed in the new version, for example: sort button, the search wizard (to find media files on your computer), displaying what Kiss-players are connected (the Info tab is gone). The Move Up and Down buttons are also gone, but you can use drag and drop to change the order of files.

Another “funny” thing is that Kiss has implemented two different user interfaces for selecting files and directories. If you press the Add Files button you get your standard Windows XP “Choose a file” dialog where on the left hand side can select Desktop, My Documents, My Computer etc but if you press Add Live Folder you get a Windows 98 style dialog where you have to work your way thru C:\Documents and Settings\Max\My Documents to get to My Documents.

These are my findings after setting it up and testing it for about 10 minutes. As usual Kiss’ product documentation sucks. And as usual Kiss don’t seem to be doing a great job at testing their software before release. Maybe they should try what most other software companies do these days – public betas.