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With HD-ready television sets flying off the shelves and precious little in the way of high-definition source material to pump through them, here’s an interesting DIY approach.
The Mediaman is an external hard disk drive casing with lots of audio-visual outputs and built-in media player software.
Pop in a great big hard disk (or buy one with the disk preinstalled) and rip all your DVDs, CDs, photos and various other digital media to it. Then hook it up to your TV/amp and you have your very own home-made multimedia jukebox.
Commonplace analogue video connections (S-video and composite) are on hand, but quality isn’t a patch on the DVI and component options, which offer HD output resolutions (720p and 1080i).
The unit will even upscale a standard-definition image to HD, which can make quite a difference.
Digital audio output – either optical or coaxial – is also possible, and a whole bevy of stereo and 5.1 surround-sound analogue connections is available.
Picture and sound are generally very good and the on-screen menus and remote handset are both easy to use.
Unfortunately there are a couple of drawbacks. First, the HVX-3500 doesn’t have any video inputs or a facility to record video to its hard disk; this would have been a genuinely useful feature.
Second, no software is provided to rip and/or convert media to the HVX-3500’s preferred formats. Users will have to scour the web for useful freeware alternatives.
The only other aspect that’s absent is some kind of built-in network ability – either in the shape of Wifi or a plain old Ethernet socket. Again, the facility to store and play media over a network would have been a great bonus.
That said, the type of technology enthusiasts who might be attracted by the HVX-3500’s do-it-yourself style will undoubtedly find a way of networking it anyhow.
All Multimedia Players
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