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 pre-installed) 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 co-axial – 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 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. 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 Wi-Fi or a plain old Ethernet socket. That said, the type of technology enthusiasts who might be attracted to the HVX-3500’s do-it-yourself style will undoubtedly find a way of networking it anyhow.
Verdict 5 stars
A clever little box of tricks, with a wide selection of connections and HD capabilities.
Price: €185
Contact: www.playengine.co.uk
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