This product is out of stock, and not coming back.
It may have been replaced by a newer version, see replacement/alternatives listed below.
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This is the one to get. Plays every movie and tv show I put on it. Lightweight and portable. Even comes with it's own carrying case and battery supply! Easy to use controls. Highly recommend.
This hard disk player is everything I hoped for. The packaging is very good and the player came the the USA without any tax or import duties. I purchased a 2-inch disk drive from TigerDirect.com for less than $80 US and it sid into the unit smoothly.
The manual is obviously a machine-translated Chinese-to-English job, usable but not very clear in some areas. The important parts (specifications and warnings) are clear enough.
The device works as a USB disk drive under MS-Windows and comes with a driver disk for Win-98 systems. I used it under XP without any problems (no drivers needed.) You'll almost certainly need to format and partition the disk drive yourself. The instructions in the manual are sufficient for this task. Connecting the device to a PC involves using an odd cable with three "A" USB plugs - the two-head side goes into your PC, the other side goes into the HDD player. There isn't any explanation for this in the manual, but the extra "A" USB plug is drawing voltage to power for the HDD player. When plugged into your PC, the HDD player doesn't need its own power supply, a big plus for using with a laptop. Please noice that you'll need two available USB ports on your PC to use the HDD player.
You'll need some sort of tool to rip DVDs or CDs if you plan to use this device for more than viewing photos. Under Windows there are many available - I use one from www.isofter.com, but there are many others available. If you're going to rip a lot of DVD's, get a ripper that automatically names chapters/titles, it will save you a lot of time.
The output jacks work just like advertised - VGA or RCA type composite audio & video. I especially like the fact that I can use this connected to a TV or to a monitor - or even connected to a PC as an external drive. The remote control is necessary and very simple to use. The picture-show mode will play an MP3 in the background and use any of several transition modes.
The device isn't perfect. I couldn't get the HDD player to appear as a disk drive under Linux (I tried under SUSE 10.1.) The HDD player lacks an onboard MPEG encoding to record stand-alone RCA video streams (like from broadcast TV or from a video player.) You could purchase a separate encoder but it probably isn't worth the hassle. An SD-RAM reader would be a handy way to move a movie from your MP4 player to this device (and Chinavasion does sell HDD players with the SD-RAM option.)
All in all, this is a really great device for either a car video player or a home video player to replace all those DVDs. I bought mine to replace the big stack of DVDs by the children's TV, but I will also grab the player and plug it into the video monitor in the car... imagine, around 70+ videos to go... A super value. I love it! I highly recommend this device.