Tosh' SD290: stuttery, with USB-stick.

[AllFumbs]

Bought a Toshiba SD290 today – Comet, £35 – for its USB-slot. Tonight transferred a 697Mb episode of The Wire in '.avi'-format onto an 8Gb USB-2 stick. (A Kingston Data Traveler – ugh! Yank spelling.) 'Unsupported USB' came up; then a lightbulb popped on over my head: the USB-stick was formatted for Apple Mac. Erased it and reformatted it in MS-DOS i.e. FAT32, re-transferred The Wire onto it again and this time it worked.

The picture was fine but uh-oh, I could hear the actors speak their lines a good second before their mouths moved. And in an action-sequence – thankfully, near the end – the sound went all choppy and never really settled down again.

Any idea what's the cause? Is it, simply, that the Toshiba SD290 isn't all that good? (I'll happily take it back if the general opinion is that there's a better alternative for around the same price.) Or is it the Kingston flash-drive?

Thank you,

AF.

[AllFumbs]

I know it seems sad, replying to your own thread, but bear with me.

I wonder if my problem with the Toshiba SD290 was because it was faulty. Eventually I did find a USB flash-drive that worked well with it – see my other posting; but after just two evenings' viewing the thing would not recognize any USB-stick at all. (What Tosh', indeed.)

So the SD290's going back to C*met and a Philips DVP-5990 is on its way from up the Am*zon. (Twice the price: though I expect it to last a bit more than twice as long.)

AF.

[John Henry]

I will send it back as I brought the 290 for £15 and I thought it was only worth £15 and not £35.

[AllFumbs]

Flip, JH, whereja get an SD290 for three blueys? Do tell.

(And yes, I took mine back.)

AF.

[John Henry]

It was with a voucher posted on another forum from Littlewoods.

[rocketroger]

Originally Posted by John Henry

It was with a voucher posted on another forum from Littlewoods.

i had the same problem...i sent mine back to littlewoods direct....cheap , tacky palyer...then again it could have been faulty..

[JakeyTheSnake]

I have the same problem sometimes with my £206 Panasonic DVD-recorder.

Sometimes I check and find it's using an uncommon type of MPEG encoding, but the other day whilst watching Goldeneye (James Bond is awesome) on USB stick, the playback started becoming jerky about 60% of the way through. But then you could pause it, and play it again later and it'd be fine for a while. The longer you paused it, the longer it was fine for afterwards. Almost as though it was loading it into RAM because it couldn't read it fast enough from USB...

Any thoughts?