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Movies on your TV sans DVD player
BY CHRIS CHONG
AIVX DVP-254
(Sarotech Co Ltd)
Portable hard drive enclosure/media player
Supported video formats: AVI (DivX/Xvid), MPG, DAT, VOB
Supported audio formats: MP3, WMA, OGG
Supported image formats: JPEG
Interface: USB 2.0 (Hi-speed), ATA (for hard drive)Outputs: Composite/HD
component video out, stereo/5.1-channel audio out
Other features: FM radio transmitter, upgradeable firmware
System requirements: PC/Mac with USB ports; compatible with Windows 98 or
higher, Mac OS 9 or higher and
Linux 2.4 or higher.
Size: 126 x 75 x 18.5mm
Weight: 115g (without hard drive)
Price: RM499
Website: www.banleong.com.my, www.sarotech.com
Review unit courtesy of Ban Leong Technologies Sdn Bhd (03) 7805-5400
THE Sarotech AiVX is a small and fairly portable 2.5in (notebook) hard drive
enclosure that doubles as a high-capacity external storage device and a
standalone media player (provided you’ve got a television or stereo to plug it
into, that is).
It’s fairly portable in a sense that it doesn’t have any optional battery packs
and requires you to lug around an AC adaptor power brick – even if you’re only
using it for storage.
Although the AiVX can be powered from USB ports that provide enough power, we’ve
found that we had to have it plugged into the AC adaptor when used with all the
machines in the In.Tech office.
As a portable mass storage device, it works quite well. Data transfer speeds are
good, thanks to the USB 2.0 Hi-Speed interface.
You’ll have to supply your own 2.5in notebook ATA hard drive, though – the
slightly hefty RM499 price tag only gets you the enclosure itself.
A pocket video library and player
If you install a big enough hard drive into the AiVX, you could carry several
DVD movies in your pocket (or even your entire collection if you’ve compressed
them into the DivX format).
It’s a great solution for sharing videos and music – simply copy the files onto
the AiVX, bring it over to a friend’s house and watch it on his TV.
As a general guideline, the AiVX supports all open-standard video codecs that
conform to either the MPEG-1, -2 or -4 standards.
This basically means DivX/Xvid video in AVI, MPG, VideoCD DAT and DVD video VOB
files.
Unfortunately, you’re out of luck if you’re thinking of playing movies in
Quicktime format (mov), Windows Media Video (wmv), OGM (ogm) or Matroska (.mkv)
containers, or RealMedia (rm).
Overall, the video quality is good, although some of my videoclips appear to be
cropped. In any case, the video quality is identical to what you’d get from one
of those multi-function DVD players that also play media files that you’ve burnt
into a CD-R or DVD-R.
In fact, the AiVX probably uses the same electronics.
The AiVX supports 720p and 1080i HDTV output (through component outputs) but,
ironically, it doesn’t seem to provide support for actual HDTV-quality video.
I tried a couple of HD movie trailers from the official DivX website (www.divx.com)
and the player would just hang.
To be fair, none of the DivX-capable DVD players that I’ve come across have been
able to play back DivX HD video either.
On the audio front, it supports MP3, WMA and OGG files, which are pretty much
all you need, really. The sound quality is good and the ability to play
5.1-channel soundtracks is a bonus.
Slight usability issues
The user interface could have been much better, though – it’s not designed to
handle a large number of media files. The main problem is that it doesn’t offer
thumbnails, searching or sorting functions (date, album, size, etc) of any sort
– all you get is a file directory view.
It’s particularly frustrating when attempting to navigate through JPEG images
and music files, which tend to come in hundreds (or even thousands), since there
isn’t any quick way to scroll through your lists.
It doesn’t accept audio playlists or photo albums either, which may have gone a
long way in addressing the navigation issues.
On the plus side, the AiVX has upgradeable firmware. This is important since it
opens the door for supporting other audio/video formats in the future, bug fixes
and new features.
Upgrading the firmware is pretty simple – simply drop the BIN file into a
directory marked “update” and select the update firmware option on the menu.
(Note that Sarotech has released a number of firmware upgrades since the
product’s launch, so the good news is that product support looks good.)
Conclusion
The AiVX is a rather cool device, although I feel that its usefulness is
somewhat compromised by its reliance on an AC adaptor (even when used as a
storage device), which prevents it from being a true, carry-anywhere
storage/multimedia device. An optional battery pack would’ve been nice.
If you have a large collection of movies or music on your computer that you’d
like to share with others – without having to burn them all into CD-Rs or DVD-Rs
– then the AiVX might just be what you’ve been looking for.
Pros: Good video quality; very portable; has RGB-component/HDTV video and
coaxial audio output; upgradeable firmware.
Cons: User interface could have been better; currently no support for DiVX HD
movies; limited video codec support; a tad pricey.
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| There are 4 standard formats. D10 and D18 are not
as common. A DVD-5 (single sided) DVD-Video disc will hold nominally 133 minutes of high quality MPEG-2 encoded video, together with three surround-sound audio channels and four subtitle channels. (Without video compression one DVD-5 disc would hold only about 3 minutes of video). A DVD-9 (dual layer) disc increases the playing time to 240 minutes of continuous video. A DVD-10 (double sided) disc will hold a nominal 133 minutes on each side (ie 266 minutes in all), but the disc needs to be turned over to play the other side. A DVD-18 (dual layer, doubled sided) disc can hold 240 minutes on each side and the disc also needs to be turned over to play the other side. Most DVD is D9 or D5 format. DVD-Cloner can clone D9 to just ONE DVDr/rw disc (D5 format) without evident losing. |