DViCO TViX

To Nathan Davis, interlaced means wearing lingerie across borders.

It doesn't have TV in or even an Ethernet port, but slated as a portable multimedia jukebox, these functions are not the idea behind it. This is a portable USB 2.0 external hard drive chassis that you whack in a PATA hard drive of your choice and use to not only store and retrieve data, but also play media files and view image slideshows on the TV. This is not meant to be a home theatre PC, but essentially a portable ‘Sneakernet' device that has gone large, with the ability to plug into a TV or other composite, component, s-video or optical-wielding device and spit out the contents. And this it does damn well.

It has the ability to output high quality media via an impressive selection of signal types and supports outputting video right up to 1920 x 1080 – albeit, interlaced – NTSC or PAL and this is all entirely configurable. Handy. At the time of writing, it has the inbuilt function to read MPEG1, MPEG2 (AVI and VOB) and MPEG4 (AVI, DivX, XviD) video formats. There was no support for ASF, WMV, 3ivX and other file formats, but future means are highly possible, and likely, as one of the great abilities of the TViX is it can easily be flash updated. Just copy the binaries over to the unit, plug it back into the telly, boot it up and load the files.

The file systems it supports are FAT32 and NTFS – that considered you don't need to insert a brand new hard drive. You can easily whack in an existing one and continue to use the data on it. Multiple partitions are also supported. For DVD movies, all you have to do is copy all the files directly off a DVD to the TViX and it performs the magic, reading the files as if still on a DVD, with the menus and other options still in place.

It may be a tad pricey, but it's truly one of the most fully kittedout external hard drive gadgets we've seen. Definitely something worth considering.