When Chemists Attack

A few posts ago, I described my experience in trying to use my XBOX 360 as an mp3 player for my home theater system. Unfortunately, the 360 is crippled. You can’t copy your music from your computer to the internal hard drive.

Enter the “multimedia hard drive enclosure”, a class of small devices that promise to play all your music, movies, and pictures from a small quiet device that plugs right into your stereo. That sounded like just what I needed!

I found a good price on a TVisto 3500-SATA, a small device that’s barely bigger than the 3.5″ hard drive that it encloses. Along with the TVisto, I picked up an inexpensive 500GB SATA drive to store my stuff. So how well does it work? Read on
to find out.

Hooking up the TVisto

The TVisto is definitely a DIY device. Normally, you’d have to install the hard drive yourself. However, the vendor that I purchased my TVisto from had done that for me. Even then, the TVisto wasn’t ready to use. Here’s what I had to do to prepare the TVisto for my files.

1. Format the drive. You have the option of choosing FAT32, NTFS, or HFS+. Do not format the drive as FAT32. Unless you’re a Mac person, use NTFS. FAT32 doesn’t support files large enough for full-quality DVD rips.
2. Make some directories on the drive. You need to create these directories: Movies, Music, Pictures, and firmware. Case is important. Depsite what the manual says, the “firmware” directory must begin with a small “f”, while the other three directories must begin with capital letters.
3. Copy files. All files must be in the right main directory, otherwise the TVisto won’t recognize them. For example, music files must be located somewhere inside the Music directory (either in the directory itself or a subdirectory) or they can’t be played.

To hook the TVisto to your home theater, you can use either the provided s-video cable or an extra-cost component video cable. Much like an XBOX, the TVisto uses proprietary cables for video. You’ll be stuck paying extra if you want better quality video, and heaven help you if you damage one of the cables. You can only buy replacements cables online.

Both the s-video and component cables produce analog stereo audio. A coaxial digital output and cable are provided. I used both the analog and digital audio connections and the component video cable to hook the TVisto up to my Rotel preamplifier.

Setting up the TVisto

Once everything was plugged in, I needed to configure the device for my stereo system. The TVisto comes preconfigured to use s-video or composite output, and must be switched to a different mode if you use the component cable, otherwise there will be no picture. So, if you start off with the component cable attached, you won’t get a picture on your TV until you hit the “TV Mode” button on the remote control a few times. It’d be better if the TVisto could either detect which cable you were using or just output s-video and component video simultaneously.

The settings menu allows you to select what video mode you want to use (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i), your TV formal (NTSC or PAL), your TV format (4:3 or 16:9), and the language for menus.

You can also set the audio output mode to “analog” or “digital”, but this seems to have no effect. Both settings output both analog stereo over a stereo pair of RCA cables and and digital audio over the coaxial connection.

There’s a screensaver option: you can set the TVisto to blank the screen after 5 minutes or more of inactivity. That’s good if you have a plasma or projection television, but beware. The screen saver doesn’t always turn on when it should.

There’s an option to upgrade the firmware of the unit, too – but as of today there’s no firmware newer than April 2007 available for download.

Using the TVisto

The first thing you’ll notice when using the TVisto is that the on-screen menus are ugly, with large bright white text that is always displayed in the same spot on the screen. Yuck!

The second thing you’ll notice when using the TVisto is that the interface is slow. Changing from one menu to another can sometimes take up to five seconds, and almost never takes less than a full second. Navigating to a directory full of files slows the TVisto’s interface down even more.

Slow interface aside, how does the TVisto perform as a media player? Answer: it depends. The TVisto does some things well, and other things very poorly.

Movies

Video playback is the best feature of the TVisto. It plays back quite a variety of videos – DVD rips in ISO and VOB format, DivX and XviD videos, mpegs from VideoCDs, etc.

Ripping a DVD to an ISO file and playing it through the TVisto allows you to use the DVD menus exactly like you’d be able to do if you put the actual DVD into a dedicated DVD player.

That’s nice for DVDs with special features or several programs.

Subtitles and other DVD features are also supported, and the TVisto will output either Dolby Digital or DTS audio. You can fit 60 or so average-sized DVDs (as ISO files) on a 500GB drive.

The TVisto might do its job playing DVD ISOs a little too well. It forces you to watch “unskippable” content (some ads, FBI warnings, etc.) just like a real DVD player does.

Sometimes, the TVisto won’t play a DVD ISO. For Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, playing the ISO file sent me to a screen telling me to get a region 1 player. The Princess Bride just gave me a black screen. Whether there was a problem with my ripping (using k3b) or the TVisto itself, I don’t know.

You can also rip the individual titles off a DVD and save them as VOB files. This gives you the same video and audio quality the original DVD does, but can save space if the original DVD is filled up with junk (like ads for other movies) that you don’t want. You’ll lose the menus, but you’ll also not be forced to watch or store anything you don’t want. This is also a way to get around an ISO that won’t play. I had no trouble with Final Fantasy or The Princess Bride when I ripped them as VOB files (using vobcopy).

I don’t do much video downloading, but most of the avi files I had around played without problems. Unfortunately for me, PSP-compatible MP4 files would not play on the TVisto.

Video quality, overall, was good – though it depends on the source material. DVD ISOs looked just as good on the TVisto as the original DVD looks in the player. The TVisto upconverts video like some newer DVD players do, but upconverting to 1080i on the TVisto causes some subtitles to become garbled. 720p didn’t have that problem.

Overall, the TVisto is a pretty good little video player. But that’s not what I really wanted it for. I wanted it for …

Music

The TVisto is primarily a video player, and it appears that no thought at all was put into any other function of the device. My evidence?

All the TVisto can do with music files is play them from a single directory, either in alphabetical order or in random order. The TVisto will not play more than one directory at a time, nor will it play files in subdirectories. It will not even advance to another directory once the current directory is done. There’s no playlist support, except for a useless option to temporarily select only some of the files in a single directory for playing.

I expect more than this from a device which tries to be a media center. I can work around the limitations of the TVisto to some extent by just dumping the mp3 files I want to play at the same time into one directory, but that wastes drive space. Plus, I shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. To put things in perspective, my Neo Home Jukebox supports multiple playlists and can deal with subdirectories. It was made in 2002.

The TVisto has more severe problems playing music:

1. It does weird things with its digital output when playing mp3 files. When you first start to play a music file, the TVisto sets the digital output to a sampling rate of 48 KHz. After a second or so, it switches the digital output to 44.1 KHz – causing the preamplifier to mute temporarily while it switches to 44.1 kHz. If the TVisto only did this once per playback session, it wouldn’t be an issue. But this happens with every file, so every song you listen to through the digital outputs has a messed-up two seconds at the beginning. I have several other devices that can play mp3 files through a digital output, and none of them show this behavior  It makes the digital output of the TVisto useless for music. At least there’s still the analog output.
2. The screen saver never activates during music playback.  There aren’t any visualizations, either – the screenshot I’ve posted above is all the TVisto shows while playing music.  Long music sessions with the TVisto could damage a plasma or projection screen.

The TVisto is a crappy music player. It’s usable thtough the analog audio outputs, but just barely.

Pictures

The TVisto might be adequate for showing a picture or two on the TV set, but that’s about it. While it does allow you to rotate an image and zoom, these perks are made almost useless by the slow
interface. You have to wait several seconds for each picture to load.  In slideshow mode, the next picture might start loading before the interface recognizes that you’ve pressed a button like zoom or rotate.  If you try rotation during a slide show, the button might not end up getting processed until several pictures later. Oops!

Nominally, the picture viewer supports thumbnails. Perhaps I should have used the singular, since it can display a maximum of one thumbnail at a time. It takes almost as much time to display a thumbnail as to display a full-size picture. These limitations completely defeat the purpose of having thumbnails.

Rating the TVisto

If you’re looking for a portable video player that can hold a lot of video and can attach easily to a television, the TVisto is a nice option. It’s cheap, and the latest models support large (and also cheap) SATA drives.

If you’re looking for something to handle your music or photos, look elsewhere. The TVisto certainly has enough storage capacity for both, and should be up to the tasks. Unfortunately, the TVisto is crippled by bugs in mp3 playing and a crappy interface.

Pros:

• Inexpensive
• Handles lots of different file formats
• Good video quality
• Digital output supports Dolby Digital and DTS for DVD rips
• Very small and very quiet, unlike a PC or an XBOX 360
• Metal case – because metal cases are cool

Cons:

• Agonizingly slow interface (not an issue while playing videos, but annoying when selecting which files to play)
• Music player is buggy, slow, and primitive
• Photo viewer is slow and primitive
• Proprietary, hard-to-replace s-video and component cables
• Proprietary, hard to replace external power supply
• Sharp edges on metal case – because cutting off a finger is not cool!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.