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Preview: INOi MeDrive Digital Media Player |
We at CDFreaks would like to present a review of the Digital Media Player from INOi, the HV355U-00080. The HV355 is a powerful external hard drive. When connected with AV equipments, it plays back media files via its built-in hard drive directly. The HV355 not only stores data, plays movie, music, and photos, but also provides uncompromised high definition display and digital sound quality. It supports computer hot swap and high speed data transfer with USB 2.0 interface.
Company Information:
Let us take a look at some of the company information found at the INOi (USA) Website:
INOi is a company dedicated to manufacturing and marketing the latest innovative products for the computer and consumer electronics channels. INOi’s mission is providing products that bridge the gap between computer and consumer and make their customers lives easier and more productive.
Some of our latest products consist of devices that allow you to watch downloaded movies from the internet conveniently in the comfort of your living room as well as external miniature hard drive products that allow you to store all of your precious digital photos and important files in a product that fits in the palm of your hand.
INOi’s products are available in the US and Canada though major retailers, on-line resellers and national computer and consumer distributors.
Headquartered in Southern California, INOi employs a full team of seasoned sales and marketing personnel as well as a fully trained and dedicated technical support staff that are available in the event customers need assistance with their products. INOi also has a fully staffed overseas Research and Development and manufacturing facilities in Taiwan.
For more information about INOi, please refer to the corporate website: http://www.inoi.com
Drive Specifications:
Let’s take a closer look at the drive features.
- The INOi MeDrive is capable of playing back Mpeg1 (VCD), Mpeg2 (DVD) movie files, DivX/Xvid (AVI) and movie files although GMC and Q-PEL pertaining to DivX and Xvid are not supported. The drive will also play MP3 Music files and Jpeg photo/graphics files
- DivX subtitle: IDX/SUB, SRT, ASS, SSA, SUN (type II), SMI, PSB Audio/Subtitle/Angle Selection
- The INOi MeDrive when attached to a PC operates as a Hi-speed USB 2.0 hard drive and supports both NTFS and FAT32 file systems
- Supports both NTSC and PAL systems
- Supports component output: The INOi MeDrive incorporates video jacks (Y/Pb/Pr jacks) which provides higher picture quality
- Supports progressive scan output
- Provides a Coaxial jack to output Dolby Digital audio to a Dolby Digital receiver
- Full feature Remote Control that can also be stored on the bottom of the drive
Page 2 What’s inside the box
What’s inside the box?
In this section we will take a look at what the drive came shipped with and take a look at the drive and its technology.
Front
Back
Left Side and Right side
Top and Bottom
Contents of the retail box
Included in the retail package:
- The INOi MeDrive itself (80GB 3.5” IDE HDD, 48-bit LBA)
- Installation CD
- User Manual and Quick installation guide
- Remote control
- Power cable, USB2 cable, Composite and Component cables
Now it’s time to take a look at the drive itself:
Front and side
Back
Bottom with Remote
Test machine:
For this review we will be using a computer with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: eVGA / Jetway 939GT4-SLI
- Processor: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165 @ 2.7GHz
- RAM: 2x 1GB G.SKILL Extreme Series 2GBZX @ 250MHz
- Graphics Card: eVGA 7900GT 512 KO with Zalman vf900 @ 650/1600
- Sound: Realtek AC'97 Onboard
- Hard disk: 3x 320GB SATA Seagate
- Television: Philips 27” 27PT6441/37
Software:
- DivX Pro 6.5
- SimpleDivX 1.40.24
- TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress
- SubCreator 1.2.0.117
- Exact Audio Copy v0.95 beta4
On the next page we will take a look at the software and drive installation…
Software and drive installation:
According to the instruction manual we first need to insert the Utility CD and install the Utility software (for Windows98 SE you also need to install the USB driver), as you can see if you don’t already have a PDF format reader you can install Acrobat Reader to access the User manual located on the utility CD.
Installation
Private folder software location
Setup complete
The software installation is very straight forward and only takes a few seconds and it completed successfully.
Let us look at how we can hook up the drive to our test system.
As you can see from our screen shot the drive hooks up simply as any other USB/IEEE 1394 (Firewire) device would including the power supply (our test unit is a USB only drive).
The INOi MeDrive was shipped formatted to FAT32 so unless we choose to format as NTFS we are ready to start using our drive right away.
First we will make a few folders on our INOi MeDrive to help us keep the media that we will copy better organized.
During installation with the Utility CD we have a program called “Private Folder Setup”, with this easy to use utility we can password protect up to 16 Private Folders by first clicking on the folder we want to protect then entering a 4 numerical code and clicking on “Mark as Private”. To then access this folder we simple enter the code.
Once the files are copied we need to shutdown the INOi MeDrive but first we need to use the Safely Remove Hardware Icon, you will find this Icon in your system tray:
Simple select you drive and click “Stop”, this will make sure all files are written to your drive before removing the USB2 cable. Now we can power down the INOi MeDrive by pressing and holding the power button in until the drive shuts down. Now it is safe to unhook the drive.
Now we will take a look at the options we have when hooking up our unit to our AV equipment (for this review we will be using a standard 27” Television to view our media files).
Here we see the available options we have for hooking up our drive to out television. For our testing we will be using the Composite Video Output
Now that we have the unit hooked to our television using the Composite Video Output and the power plugged in we can turn on the unit. We may want to change some device settings, so let’s take a look at navigating through the menus and see what options we have available.
We can see it’s easy to change the OSD and Audio
Now you will notice the other advanced audio settings
Here we have the advanced Video settings
Our final menu with screen saver, angle mark and closed caption options
On the next page we will take a look at copying and playing media files…
Copying and playing media files:
Before we start copying our media files to our drive and playing them we will take a quick look at how we prepared some of the media file formats for use in this review.
First we started by ripping a portion of a DVD9 movie with DivX Pro 6.5 so we have a High Quality DivX video file. Seeing the Xvid codec is capable of good quality video and has lower space requirements we will also rip the very same content using SimpleDivX 1.40.24 to the Xvid format.
As you can see from out screen shots the DivX has a higher bitrate and resolution that will result in a higher quality picture but it will also take up much more space than the Xvid format.
We now copied those files onto our INOi drive and tried playing them on our television, they both played perfectly without a hitch. While the DivX format file did produce superior video quality the Xvid format file was still of very good quality both in audio and video.
The INOi MeDrive allows the use of “subtitles” along with AVI files so let’s create our own set of subtitles and see how they work. We used SubCreator 1.2.0.117 to make a few short subtitles to add to our video file both in .SRT and .SSA formats.
We then named the subtitle files that same as our video file but with the appropriate file extension (i.e. test_subs.srt) and copied it to the same location as the video file test_subs.avi. Again we played the video file and the subtitles showed up perfectly in just the spots we had added them.
Now we will use TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress along with our Test DivX file to make some of the other supported formats the INOi MeDrive drive is capable of playing and see how they perform. We will make a DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG, MPEG-1 Video-CD (VCD) and a MPEG-2 Super Video-CD (SVCD). The baseline DivX file we are using is 8 minutes and 30 seconds long and takes up 87.8 MB of hard drive space.
Now that we have gone over what file types we have copied our test video files to our INOi MeDrive we are ready to play them, let’s see how it went.
After viewing all the test files for the full 8 minutes and 30 seconds each we found they all played perfectly on our TV set. Both the audio and video played smooth with no skipping or stuttering. As expected the DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG gave us the best picture quality followed by the Mpeg-2 (SVCD) and then the Mpeg-1 (VCD). Though the Mpeg-1 (VCD) video file played very smoothly it was a bit grainy but we should also consider the file size that we are working with. The DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG took up a 582 MB of hard drive space for an 8 minute and 30 second clip while the Mpeg-2 (SVCD) took up 169 MB and the Mpeg-1 (VCD) used only 85.1 MB.
The INOi MeDrive is also capable of playing audio files, we used Exact Audio Copy v0.95 beta4 to rip a few tracks from a Music CD in both .MP3 and .WAV format.
After creating both the sound files we again copied them to our INOi MeDrive and hooked it up to our Television, both the .WAV and .MP3 played flawlessly with zero sound issues and no skipping. With this being a hard drive based drive we were able to search through our sound files quickly and select the file we wanted to play and it loads immediately with zero lag time like you might see on a DVD player when playing a normal CD.
Another very useful feature the INOi MeDrive has is the ability to play Graphics files both in the .JPG and .JPEG format. I had just taken some photos and using windows camera wizard I copied some photos from my camera directly to the INOi MeDrive, this worked in the same way as would copying directly to my hard drive “very fast”.
After copying them directly to the INOi MeDrive we plugged the drive into our Television once again we were able to quickly browse through our pictures. This was a great experience compared to first having to burn the graphics files on a CD-R disc and waiting for each file to load, the INOi MeDrive makes skimming through photos easy especially when you looking through hundreds to find the one you want.
Next you can read the conclusion from our tests…
Positive:
- Very easy for anyone to operate
- Simple installation for both TV and computer
- Play most popular audio, video and picture file formats
- Intuitive On-screen display
- Quiet operation
- Plays videos with no skipping or stuttering
- Wide range of subtitle support
- The ability to easily password protect folders
- Portable so you can use it on any TV at home or away
- Video and Audio quality are superb
- Supports both NTSC and PAL file formats
- Ability to use FAT32 or NTFS file system
Negative:
- No controls on the unit itself, you must use the remote
Conclusion:
To sum it all up, this is what we would say: "The INOi MeDrive is a very easy to use full feature storage device that will allow anyone to take a variety of audio, video and picture files and play them back on most television with high definition display and digital sound quality.”
The suggested retail price is US $99 (June 2007).
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Thanks to:
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INOi USA – For providing the drive used in this review. |
