If you've tweaked your home office network to where you're finally satisfied with its performance and range, get ready for more tweaking as a new wave of home network equipment comes on the scene.

Media players, aka, media adapters, are devices that let you take your PC-based multimedia content (music, photos and videos) and stream it over your wired or wireless network to display on a TV set and/or stereo system.

The good news is the increased network traffic caused by streaming multimedia over your home network won't put too much of a hit on the system. In our testing, we could still surf the Internet and do file transfers while streaming our media content. Plus, these players are generally easy to configure. If you’ve set up a stereo system, and have some concept of audio in/out and cabling, setup should take no time off the clock.

The bad news? More equipment is coming, including things like video cameras (nanny cams) and video game console adapters that will vie for your network bandwidth — especially if you’re running wireless only. Fortunately, equipment prices continue to drop, so upgrading your 802.11b network to 802.11g (or even 802.11a) won't put a big dent in your wallet.

We tested three of the latest media players, and offer thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t and improvements we’d like to see. These first systems will probably only appeal to the early adopter crowd; they lack the polish needed for widespread adoption.

SMC sent us the Universal Wireless Digital Audio/Video Receiver (SMCWMR-AG), a $199 device that streams audio and video, and plays a slideshow of images on your TV. The device connects via RCA audio and video jacks to a television (video) and stereo system (audio), and connects to your network via Ethernet cable or 802.11b wireless. It streams content from a "media server," which is the PC (or PCs) on which you install the SMC software. Tell the server which content (folders) you want the receiver to share, and you can stream it.

The good: Setup was a breeze; install the software, connect the hardware. To change the device’s SSID to match our wireless network, we used the TV remote to retype the SSID in the settings page manually, a method we prefer. Some devices — like those from Linksys, Gateway and Turtle Beach — sometimes scan for the network. But in testing media players for the Holiday Gift Guide and past Cool Tools columns we found the software doesn’t always “guess” the ID correctly. We liked how the device can simultaneously display a slideshow and play music, and that it can play MPEG videos. We also liked how SMC provided separate audio and video cables, so we could stream music to our stereo.