Mvix Adds Multimedia Player Sauces to External Storage

MV-5000U's Product Details And Features

Unicorn Information Systems Co. Ltd., based in South Korea, makes the MV-5000U. Mvix Inc. sells the unit either without a hard drive or equipped with a choice of 80, 160, 250 or 300 GB drives (UltraATA supported), all of which are available at the same cost as you would pay anywhere else.

Customers can also order a car pack for $ 24.99. This includes a 12 V mobile power supply and an IR port extension, but it does not solve the question of where to place the device inside your car.

Four different frequencies in the upper 80 MHz range can be selected to broadcast music (or the audio component of a video file) to your car stereo. Since only even frequencies can be selected for audio broadcasting, the device may have not been designed with North America and odd frequencies in mind. This inaccuracy causes the audio quality to be inferior compared to RCA cable transmission.

The drive comes with a standard USB 2.0 connector, optical and coaxial digital audio outputs, analog RCA audio jacks and composite and S-Video out, as well as component jacks for high resolution video. A tiny fan serves to ventilate the hard drive, which connects to an electrical outlet with a 12-V power supply. Mvix ships the unit with the power supply and USB and RCA audio/video cables.

As soon as you install, partition and format a hard drive, any type of audio, video or photo content copied onto the MV-5000U can be played back with the front controls and display or the remote control. The latter makes most sense if you hook up the unit to a TV or projector, since the unit will provide much more information and easier navigation. Common audio and video codecs such as MPEG-1 to MPEG-4 (DivX 3.11 to 5.x, XvidX) are supported. Exceptions are Windows Media Video, Real Audio/Video and Apple QuickTime. DivX 6.x seems to be too new to be supported as well. There were several new firmware versions released over the last couple of months. All of these offer better usability, but did not add support for additional video codecs yet.