digitalsafari
Established Member
EDIT - The unit has been returned for a refund - avoid!
I just got the 40GB Mustek PVR-H140 and it's good value for the money, but an Archos is more polished.
I paid GBP 169 plus VAT from Microdirect about GBP 205 delivered.
Size wise it's slightly wider than a iPod (3G) by about 2CM, but it's double the depth so is not pocket sized, and is a little heavier.
My use for it, is dumping lots of TV from a Sky+ for watching when away on business.
For this it works a treat with picture quality on a par with in-flight systems in SP mode (HQ is very good, LP is VCDish).
Sound quality is nowwhere my iPod, but is good enough, again think in-flight system quality.
Recordings made via it's AV input only have mono audio. I knew about this prior to purchasing and because I will use it the most on noisy aircraft (even with noise canceling headphones) not such a big deal.
Prerecorded files playback in stereo.
It only plays ASF video, MP3 and WMA audio formats, all other formats have to be transcoded by the bundled WinXP software, this also requires you to download Windows Media Encoder 7.1 from MS.
The conversion process for video is not that fast as the application was only using 64percent CPU on a P4 3GHz HT with 1GB RAM, but it worked.
There is no resume function, so if you turn off the player mid way into a movie, when you turn it back on it's at the beginning, however you can tell it to play from a specified time via a little menu option.
The fast forward is only 4 x.
Screen quality is good enough and very bright with a reasonable viewing angle.
Not tested battery life yet.
I just got the 40GB Mustek PVR-H140 and it's good value for the money, but an Archos is more polished.
I paid GBP 169 plus VAT from Microdirect about GBP 205 delivered.
Size wise it's slightly wider than a iPod (3G) by about 2CM, but it's double the depth so is not pocket sized, and is a little heavier.
My use for it, is dumping lots of TV from a Sky+ for watching when away on business.
For this it works a treat with picture quality on a par with in-flight systems in SP mode (HQ is very good, LP is VCDish).
Sound quality is nowwhere my iPod, but is good enough, again think in-flight system quality.
Recordings made via it's AV input only have mono audio. I knew about this prior to purchasing and because I will use it the most on noisy aircraft (even with noise canceling headphones) not such a big deal.
Prerecorded files playback in stereo.
It only plays ASF video, MP3 and WMA audio formats, all other formats have to be transcoded by the bundled WinXP software, this also requires you to download Windows Media Encoder 7.1 from MS.
The conversion process for video is not that fast as the application was only using 64percent CPU on a P4 3GHz HT with 1GB RAM, but it worked.
There is no resume function, so if you turn off the player mid way into a movie, when you turn it back on it's at the beginning, however you can tell it to play from a specified time via a little menu option.
The fast forward is only 4 x.
Screen quality is good enough and very bright with a reasonable viewing angle.
Not tested battery life yet.