MX-760HD High-Definition Multimedia Center without, MX-760HD,

by MvixUSA

Product Details

• ASIN: B000LLH86W
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #97,247 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 2, 2006

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I'm pretty happy with this little thing., December 19, 2006

By 

Morbus Iff (Concord, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MX-760HD High-Definition Multimedia Center without, MX-760HD, (Electronics)

In response to an earlier blog post on OS X wireless video streaming solutions, fearless reader Scott noted the Mvix MX-760HD as offered by ThinkGeek. Out of all the possibilities posted, this seemed the most relevant: wireless, internal hard drive (entirely optional), USB connectivity, DivX and XviD playback, and composite video connectoids (along with others). After talking with Rich Knitter, MvixUSA's Director of Marketing, he agreed to send me a review unit with the hope that I also get step-by-step sharing instructions for (the as-yet-tested) Mac OS X.

Hardware setup was easy - the unit comes with a stand (which seemed a little loose until I found the center sweet spot), USB and composite video cables, a driver CD, remote control (a block of plastic with a central keypad similar to, but not as good as, a TiVo), the requisite power cables, and a 5dBi antenna. While the unit does support HD and progressive scan and all those other high-falutin' feel-goods, you'll need to supply your own cables. For this review, I've only used composite video.

I first tested without installing a hard drive because my focus was wireless streaming - I wanted my bevy of disks upstairs to combine into one voltronic horde of video bliss. Thus, after a quick load screen (in which DivX was misspelt as "Dvix"), I hopped into the Setup menu and started tweaking the network options. The UI isn't ugly (see the online PDF manual for some examples), though it does seem a bit syrupy at times, but not enough to be annoying. What was annoying is its sole support for WEP as a wireless encryption standard. I don't look forward to reconfiguring all my game consoles, laptops, and handhelds away from the WPA I had been using before. After tweaking my network (as provided by a D-Link DGL-4300), the MX-760HD connected to it just fine, without having to manually specify IPs, routers, DNS, etc.

That left me with just nailing down the actual wireless file sharing and, in the interest of keeping this review generic, I'll leave out the steps to sharing files with OS X. Suffice to say, it works just fine and isn't difficult to set up. Once your files are shared, head back over to the MX-760HD and have it "Refresh" its Movie file listing. Should everything go as smoothly as it did for me, they'll be a bit of a pause as it scans (and caches) the share, but your movie files should be displayed; anything not a recognized movie file is not shown. One of the things I continue to appreciate is the long file name listings: you can actually see more than six or eight characters, and pausing on any one title will scroll the rest of the title in place. I don't understand why they didn't use this same interface for the "Recent Items" screen, which is utterly useless in its current icon-based incarnation. Choose what you'd like to watch, and depending on the size of the video, it'll start streaming to you wirelessly in 10 to 30 seconds. Awesome.

Installation of the optional hard drive is also easy: no tools are required though I did have some troubles getting the single case screw back into place, and it took a few tries of concerted jiggling to align it just right. Mounting the MX-760HD's hard drive does require its power adapter which can cause a bit of frustration when it's entangled into the mass of cables behind your entertainment center. Having a laptop in the living room is one solution; a separate internal drive enclosure for drive swapping is another. MvixUSA recently reported that a firmware update will allow mounting over the network as a NAS/NDAS device, but no ETA on this support has been provided.

Of the 20 or so ancient but much-cherished Britney Spears music videos I threw at it, all showed signs of bad cropping - some had a healthy 20 to 30 pixel column missing from the left hand side. Modern day movie rips encoded at 16:9 receive this same chopping on the right side too. This is disheartening but my previous standby, a Philips DVP-642, also suffered the same problem. Digital video software really needs take these files, figure out what dimensions they are at runtime, then display them shrunk to fit into the TV screen with a surrounding border. Either that, or a Zoom Out (nearly everything has Zoom In, why not Out? Cheap solution!) Some folks have suggested this may be due to my use of composite cables, and I cheerful admit my ignorance and luddism.

Codec and playback support was strong: after testing the first few minutes of nearly 150 movies stored on the hard drive, only two or three gave the unit problems. QPEL support is missing, nor can the unit handle the MS-MPEG4v2 codec which all the DAP's MST3K videos are ripped as, though they admit this is a problem. There are no current plans to support these codecs in a future firmware upgrade.

I did not test the Photo or Music playing capabilities to any persnickety degree, but the smallest increment of time for image slideshows is three seconds, which turns into roughly six or seven if you're wirelessly streaming 2 MB digital camera files. It'd be nice if the unit could start caching and requesting early so that a more smoother and faster slideshow transition is possible. There does seem to be some issues with the "Recent Items" function in relation to photos or missing media or perhaps amount of media: after looking at roughly 50 images of a 500 image directory, I deleted that share leaving me with just movies to be watched. However, browsing through the media list to get to the "Setup" menu caused a freeze on the "Photo" item, which showed "Recent Items" that no longer exist. I don't know the cause, but it was about 90 seconds before I regained control. There doesn't appear to be any way to delete the "Recent Items" so, at the moment, I'm just avoiding that menu item entirely and used the "Setup" button on the remote. A day later, I am unable to reproduce this particular freeze.

Apparent "freezes" like this happened a little more often than I would like, and it always seemed related to the unit's rebuilding of a file list that I know has changed. After adding 100 GBs of movies to one directory, a new access to the hard drive caused the unit to appear unresponsive for nearly six minutes, nearly two minutes after I gave up clicking the "Down" arrow to check to see if it was working. Another down arrow finally teased a response, but my original request never happened. Accessing it again gave the lickety-split response I was hoping for and, save for these initial first requests after file modifications, access to large directories continues without incident. With that said, I dare not throw my 22,000 track MP3 library at it anytime soon (nor would I ever, as my sole desire is video watching).

I was unable to test subtitle support heavily, but there do seem to be problems with .sub and .idx files. Though it claims support for them, a Mvix help document suggests converting them to .srt instead; I was unable to get the files I had working (nor did I try to convert them). Another .srt file loaded with no problems, but the subtitles were in Italian so I am unable to confirm if they matched up with the video properly. There is support for timeshifting the subtitles backwards or forwards, and you can also change their position on screen. Finally, the color of the lettering can be changed from the default white to some others, but the font has black borders which should prevent any one color from being washed out by the current scene.

While there are problems here and there with the UI, I'm quite happy to have the MX-760HD as a central part of my video entertainment: I no longer intend to burn DVD-Rs anymore, and the wireless support removes the need for any other moving parts. Hopefully, future firmware updates will hammer out the remaining bugs, but until then, I'm quite happy to route around them: the advantages and other qualities make this combination of hard drive, streaming, and video too powerful to ignore.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The next step in the evolution of the media player, January 11, 2007

By 

E. Aamodt (Easley, SC United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MX-760HD High-Definition Multimedia Center without, MX-760HD, (Electronics)

One day over Christmas holidays, I was organizing all of my mp3 files, which were scattered across multiple folders on multiple computers throughout the house. I was consolidating them to a single external drive, when the thought hit me, "Wouldn't it be great if I could just hook this external drive directly up to my Stereo!" Needless to say, I was sure some one else must have had this idea and so I began my research. While there are a plethora of such devices, the combination of wireless streaming and the ability to play ISO files directly made the MX-760HD the logical choice. I've had this only a couple weeks and I'm very pleased with performance of this device. I won't go through all of the features as they have been very well covered in other reviews. However there are a couple of other Pros and Cons in addition to the ones previously mentioned;

Pros:
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+ Plays CSS Encrypted DVDs either from external DVD-ROM or a Folder from harddrive.

+ LCD display on the unit allows file browsing and playing directly from device without turning on the TV. Great for when I only want to listen to music.

Cons:
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+ Poor .m3u support (perhaps fixed in future firmware?)

+ Lack of NAS/NDAS (the company says a future firmware upadte may support ftp for file transfers.)

While setting up the unit is probably not for the "technically challenged", once it was configured for our home entertainment environment, my "technically challenged" wife had no problems navigating the device. As my previous foray into media players was the Primiq (a disappointment to say the least) I was pleasantly surprised by the performance and output quality of the MX-760HD.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cool gadget, December 20, 2006

By 

Mayur Misra (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MX-760HD High-Definition Multimedia Center without, MX-760HD, (Electronics)

Did a lot of reasearch before buying this and I am extremely happy with this device. The video playback of Hi-Def content is faultless. It has a true HD output 1920x1080P. Pretty much plays all my ripped DVD files, DVD ISOs, MP3 and WMVs. All my recorded TV Shows (MPEG) work brilliantly. Seems to work well over wired network but wireless implementation is poor for HD content. It doesn't like TS Mux (.TS) files created by DVB Web Scheduler. You have to capture the entire stream (Full TS). I heard that it also plays Divx6 files.. but I am yet to test those.

PROS:

+ Supports multiple file formats - you name it and it plays!

+ Simple interface. Excellent Video Quality

+ Can stream media !

+ Can read directly from any external USB device (even an external DVDROM)

+ Huge Variety of AV connections.

+ Supports large-sized (750GB) HDDs.

CONS:

- No HDMI (you can use a DVI to HDMI converter)

- Supports PATA HDDs only.

- No WPA Encryption.

- Wireless Streaming is unreliable.

- Cannot copy from USB drives or from the network.

The MX-760HD is an excellent all-in-one multimedia solution -- as long as you're not wimp about installing a hard drive. I have used it constantly for over 2 weeks and now we are even taking it on our family vacation.