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.