Copying and playing media files:

Before we start copying our media files to our drive and playing them we will take a quick look at how we prepared some of the media file formats for use in this review.

First we started by ripping a portion of a DVD9 movie with DivX Pro 6.5 so we have a High Quality DivX video file. Seeing the Xvid codec is capable of good quality video and has lower space requirements we will also rip the very same content using SimpleDivX 1.40.24 to the Xvid format.

As you can see from out screen shots the DivX has a higher bitrate and resolution that will result in a higher quality picture but it will also take up much more space than the Xvid format.

We now copied those files onto our INOi drive and tried playing them on our television, they both played perfectly without a hitch. While the DivX format file did produce superior video quality the Xvid format file was still of very good quality both in audio and video.

The INOi MeDrive allows the use of “subtitles” along with AVI files so let’s create our own set of subtitles and see how they work. We used SubCreator 1.2.0.117 to make a few short subtitles to add to our video file both in .SRT and .SSA formats.

We then named the subtitle files that same as our video file but with the appropriate file extension (i.e. test_subs.srt) and copied it to the same location as the video file test_subs.avi. Again we played the video file and the subtitles showed up perfectly in just the spots we had added them.

Now we will use TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress along with our Test DivX file to make some of the other supported formats the INOi MeDrive drive is capable of playing and see how they perform. We will make a DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG, MPEG-1 Video-CD (VCD) and a MPEG-2 Super Video-CD (SVCD). The baseline DivX file we are using is 8 minutes and 30 seconds long and takes up 87.8 MB of hard drive space.

Now that we have gone over what file types we have copied our test video files to our INOi MeDrive we are ready to play them, let’s see how it went.

After viewing all the test files for the full 8 minutes and 30 seconds each we found they all played perfectly on our TV set. Both the audio and video played smooth with no skipping or stuttering. As expected the DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG gave us the best picture quality followed by the Mpeg-2 (SVCD) and then the Mpeg-1 (VCD). Though the Mpeg-1 (VCD) video file played very smoothly it was a bit grainy but we should also consider the file size that we are working with. The DVD-Video standard compliant MPEG took up a 582 MB of hard drive space for an 8 minute and 30 second clip while the Mpeg-2 (SVCD) took up 169 MB and the Mpeg-1 (VCD) used only 85.1 MB.

The INOi MeDrive is also capable of playing audio files, we used Exact Audio Copy v0.95 beta4 to rip a few tracks from a Music CD in both .MP3 and .WAV format.

After creating both the sound files we again copied them to our INOi MeDrive and hooked it up to our Television, both the .WAV and .MP3 played flawlessly with zero sound issues and no skipping. With this being a hard drive based drive we were able to search through our sound files quickly and select the file we wanted to play and it loads immediately with zero lag time like you might see on a DVD player when playing a normal CD.

Another very useful feature the INOi MeDrive has is the ability to play Graphics files both in the .JPG and .JPEG format. I had just taken some photos and using windows camera wizard I copied some photos from my camera directly to the INOi MeDrive, this worked in the same way as would copying directly to my hard drive “very fast”.

After copying them directly to the INOi MeDrive we plugged the drive into our Television once again we were able to quickly browse through our pictures. This was a great experience compared to first having to burn the graphics files on a CD-R disc and waiting for each file to load, the INOi MeDrive makes skimming through photos easy especially when you looking through hundreds to find the one you want.

Next you can read the conclusion from our tests…

Software and drive installation

Conclusion