Longinus
14th December 2004, 07:14
I just bought a TViX player.
http://www.jetaudio.com/images/products/tvix/main.jpg
NOTE: This device is already reported in another topic here, but without any mention to its name on the body or title. So I decided to create another topic... please, if it was the wrong thing to do, tell me.
Anyway, the device is more like a jukebox. You put a normal 3.5 Hard Disk inside it, and play everything from the disk. Plug it in your computer (USB 2), and it acts like a normal external device. It's very small, and it's more solid than the picture may give you the impression. The HD takes about 1/3 of its width, 3/4 of height, and 1/1 of depth.
Having an iPod, I love the idea of a portable video player (of course, only portable because of the size), that I can store a lot of my movies, series, cartoons, etc. (And even music and pictures). So between TViX and a normal CD/DVD/Mpeg4 player, I decided to buy this. And of course, it also behaves like an enclosure for an external Hard Drive; witch is a very good thing.
What can it play?? Mpeg1 and 2 (you can just copy a DVD's VIDEO_TS folder to it), and mpeg4 inside an AVI. MP4 files won't even show up in the list of files. Can also play wav, wma, mp3 and ogg (!!), but it can't play AAC (it would be nice.. since my music is all aac). Also it can play AC3, in the DVD or inside and AVI. Has a very limited image support (only JPEG), but I don't see why anyone would want to see pictures in a television (why ipod photo? Whyyy?). I only use this to store, and view, pictures of the covers of the movies.
It plays all kind of divx and xvid without any problem. But you can't have QPEL or GMC in xvid. Packed Bitstream, etc, gives no problem and play back fine. Divx 3 is also supported without problems. BUT Divx Audio (hacked wma) is not supported. The videos cannot be bigger than 720x576, with a bitrate I could not find out (~4mgbit play back fine). You can play high quality movies (3 CDs) with full 5 channels AC3. Subtitle support is nice. They state that you can play back SAMI subs, but since I don't have any in this format, I found out that you can use SRT or SUB with no problems. In the menu you can set the color and size of the subs... And while playing, the position in the screen AND the delay (for out-of-sync subs). Probably the best support for subs in any hardware player... if it wasn't for 2 points. First; since I'm from Brazil, I have legends in Portuguese. The player can't display this... "çã", "çõ". It will convert the characters into a Japanese symbol. But I'm sure this will be corrected in future firmware updates (the release one every 2 months, at least until now). And the second problem is that sometimes the subs "flick". The foreground color disappears before the background. It's something hard to explain, and not very disturbing in the end. But it's there.
Even though they have a TVIXManager, that scan your files and see if it's playable or not (you can try to get the software and scan your files before you buy, to have an idea), I have about 2 movies that the software said it was compatible, but it's not. I get a slideshow, and not a movie. Two in about a 100 movies... so it's not that bad. AND it's important to say that the player can't view files larger than 2 GB, because the linux system that controls it, does not support them.
EDIT: Now with the new firmware, it can. But if you formatted the HD as FAT32, you can't go higher than 4gb, of course.
You can create play lists on the fly or just hit the play button and the player will just play files in order. If you press the OK button, it'll just play that file. The file manager is very simple. Just listing the files it can play. You can filter by type (picture, movie, music... by buttons in the remote control), and that's about it. Aaah… you can choose the partition of the Disk. I'm using 2 partitions, one for movies and the other for everything else. It's easy to select the partition, because there are icons of HDs (I think you can have about 5 partitions if you like) in the left side of the screen.
Quality: The quality is very nice. I would love a little more post-processing (like ffdshow), but it's just me speaking. A lot of people don't like the smooth effect. You can control zoom while playing, and correct Contrast/Brightness/Saturation. You can Fast-Forward from 4x to 32x (I don't see the 128x they said...). OR use the GOTO button, and enter the time with the remote control (very nice!).
One thing that bothers me is some red overheat (strong red color flick in the borders). In some cartoons you can notice it a lot. First I thought it was because I was using an RCA cable. But the same happened with S-Video.
You can also select the output resolution, with up to 1080i, for high-def TVs (that it's not my case... =D). I don't know how things would look like in one of these TVs (because the output would just be upscaled, of course).
Well... this covers a lot of details... If anyone is interested in buying it, I hope it helps you. If you can think of any other thing you would like to know, just ask!!
LINK (http://www.jetaudio.com/products/tvix/) for the Jetaudio product page.
LINK (http://www.tvix.co.kr/eng/) for the company that makes it.
http://www.jetaudio.com/images/products/tvix/main.jpg
NOTE: This device is already reported in another topic here, but without any mention to its name on the body or title. So I decided to create another topic... please, if it was the wrong thing to do, tell me.
Anyway, the device is more like a jukebox. You put a normal 3.5 Hard Disk inside it, and play everything from the disk. Plug it in your computer (USB 2), and it acts like a normal external device. It's very small, and it's more solid than the picture may give you the impression. The HD takes about 1/3 of its width, 3/4 of height, and 1/1 of depth.
Having an iPod, I love the idea of a portable video player (of course, only portable because of the size), that I can store a lot of my movies, series, cartoons, etc. (And even music and pictures). So between TViX and a normal CD/DVD/Mpeg4 player, I decided to buy this. And of course, it also behaves like an enclosure for an external Hard Drive; witch is a very good thing.
What can it play?? Mpeg1 and 2 (you can just copy a DVD's VIDEO_TS folder to it), and mpeg4 inside an AVI. MP4 files won't even show up in the list of files. Can also play wav, wma, mp3 and ogg (!!), but it can't play AAC (it would be nice.. since my music is all aac). Also it can play AC3, in the DVD or inside and AVI. Has a very limited image support (only JPEG), but I don't see why anyone would want to see pictures in a television (why ipod photo? Whyyy?). I only use this to store, and view, pictures of the covers of the movies.
It plays all kind of divx and xvid without any problem. But you can't have QPEL or GMC in xvid. Packed Bitstream, etc, gives no problem and play back fine. Divx 3 is also supported without problems. BUT Divx Audio (hacked wma) is not supported. The videos cannot be bigger than 720x576, with a bitrate I could not find out (~4mgbit play back fine). You can play high quality movies (3 CDs) with full 5 channels AC3. Subtitle support is nice. They state that you can play back SAMI subs, but since I don't have any in this format, I found out that you can use SRT or SUB with no problems. In the menu you can set the color and size of the subs... And while playing, the position in the screen AND the delay (for out-of-sync subs). Probably the best support for subs in any hardware player... if it wasn't for 2 points. First; since I'm from Brazil, I have legends in Portuguese. The player can't display this... "çã", "çõ". It will convert the characters into a Japanese symbol. But I'm sure this will be corrected in future firmware updates (the release one every 2 months, at least until now). And the second problem is that sometimes the subs "flick". The foreground color disappears before the background. It's something hard to explain, and not very disturbing in the end. But it's there.
Even though they have a TVIXManager, that scan your files and see if it's playable or not (you can try to get the software and scan your files before you buy, to have an idea), I have about 2 movies that the software said it was compatible, but it's not. I get a slideshow, and not a movie. Two in about a 100 movies... so it's not that bad. AND it's important to say that the player can't view files larger than 2 GB, because the linux system that controls it, does not support them.
EDIT: Now with the new firmware, it can. But if you formatted the HD as FAT32, you can't go higher than 4gb, of course.
You can create play lists on the fly or just hit the play button and the player will just play files in order. If you press the OK button, it'll just play that file. The file manager is very simple. Just listing the files it can play. You can filter by type (picture, movie, music... by buttons in the remote control), and that's about it. Aaah… you can choose the partition of the Disk. I'm using 2 partitions, one for movies and the other for everything else. It's easy to select the partition, because there are icons of HDs (I think you can have about 5 partitions if you like) in the left side of the screen.
Quality: The quality is very nice. I would love a little more post-processing (like ffdshow), but it's just me speaking. A lot of people don't like the smooth effect. You can control zoom while playing, and correct Contrast/Brightness/Saturation. You can Fast-Forward from 4x to 32x (I don't see the 128x they said...). OR use the GOTO button, and enter the time with the remote control (very nice!).
One thing that bothers me is some red overheat (strong red color flick in the borders). In some cartoons you can notice it a lot. First I thought it was because I was using an RCA cable. But the same happened with S-Video.
You can also select the output resolution, with up to 1080i, for high-def TVs (that it's not my case... =D). I don't know how things would look like in one of these TVs (because the output would just be upscaled, of course).
Well... this covers a lot of details... If anyone is interested in buying it, I hope it helps you. If you can think of any other thing you would like to know, just ask!!
LINK (http://www.jetaudio.com/products/tvix/) for the Jetaudio product page.
LINK (http://www.tvix.co.kr/eng/) for the company that makes it.