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New Media Hard Drives

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johnsonap
Seen several of these new hard drives that have remote controls, LAN ports and usb connectivity, which all in all allows you to connect to your tv and watch videos etc that are stored on the external hard drive.

Couple of questions, has anyone got one, and are they worth the money. The one i saw was £160 for a 300Gb Hard Drive.

Am guessing the main reason for them is to allow you to put your films that are on you PC onto them and watch on your TV?

Good idea on paper........but does it it really fill the void in the market that i for one am looking for?
psycosquirrel
I haven't heard of these before-- can you provide a link?
badai
this storage media has been around for quite some time. it's like portable dvd player minus the speaker and display. some of it with flash-able firware where we can install/upgrade codecs.

http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=hard+disk+player&i=44086,00.asp

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/29/hard_disk_drive_video_players_hit_the_mainstream/
ashok
whoa never seen these dvd playable hdds before... thanks for the links Smile
badai
it can't play dvd. no dvd drive, and even if you copy the dvd structure, it won't play the ifo file. you have to rip and convert the dvd first.

ashok wrote:
whoa never seen these dvd playable hdds before... thanks for the links Smile
Animal
johnsonap wrote:
Couple of questions, has anyone got one, and are they worth the money. The one i saw was £160 for a 300Gb Hard Drive.

First of all, that's quite a lot. I bought an external HD enclosure and a Hard Disk separately and got a 250Gb set up for less than £95.

johnsonap wrote:
Am guessing the main reason for them is to allow you to put your films that are on you PC onto them and watch on your TV?

Good idea on paper........but does it it really fill the void in the market that i for one am looking for?

It's ok. It does the job, but I found the user interface much more complex than it needed to be, you couldn't search for a video - you have to cycle through them all... that takes ages since it loads a preview box for each file. It also took a bit of complex formatting since the enclosure only supported playback from a FAT32 formatted disk. If you format it using the built in windows tool, this means that you need several partitions to use the whole disk. However, there are ways to get round this.

All in all, they're ok. They do the job, but they're not quite ready to replace your entire DVD collection and DVD player just yet.
ganesh
Nowadays, DVD Players / Home Theatre systems are coming along with an USB port! I have an external hard drive and just fill it up with media files and plug it into the player's USB port, and I am all set. (The manufacturer of my player is Samsung)

The player is supposed to not play DivX files from HD, but there was a trick hack to make it play (renaming the AVI files as a JPG file!) The sort if crippling these media player makers do is really sickening! And on the other hand, the ingenuity of the people who find a way to circumvent it is even more.
psycosquirrel
I just use the component out on my video card to interface to my TV, it is much easier that way. My computer is hooked up to my tv's surround system too, so it is practically the same as a DVD player on crack. Playing flash videos and games on my TV is fun too.
johnsonap
I've paid £50 for the surround with a pretty good user interface and remote etc - missing wireless network though

link is below:

http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Freecom-Freecom-MediaPlayer-3-5-Drive-In-Enclosure-Kit-26665
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