Page 4 Copying and playing media files

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 6.6.1 so we have a High Quality DivX video file for testing.

As you can see from our screen shots, the DivX has a high bitrate and resolution that will result in a high quality picture.

The INOi Media HardDrive 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 the 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. We played the video file and the subtitles showed up perfectly in just the spots we had added them.

Below you can see how the subtitles show up on our Magnavox 32” HDTV using IDX/Sub files.

Now we will use TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress along with our Test DivX file to make some of the other supported formats. The INOi Media HardDrive 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 4 minutes and 15 seconds long and takes up 45.9 MB of hard drive space.

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

After viewing all the test files for the full 4 minutes and 15 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 134 MB of hard drive space for a 4 minutes and 15 seconds clip while the Mpeg-2 (SVCD) took up 89 MB and the Mpeg-1 (VCD) used only 45 MB.

This is a shot of the Mpeg-1 (VCD) file playing on a 30” Sanyo Widescreen SD TV. Editors Note: The quality is MUCH better than is reflected in the photo below

The INOi Media HardDrive 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 Media HardDrive 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.

Below you will see the Screen display showing time and title of a chosen MP3 file while playing

Another very useful feature the INOi Media HardDrive 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 Media HardDrive, this worked in the same way as would copying directly to my hard drive “very fast”.

After we copied our photos directly to the INOi Media HardDrive from our camera we plugged the drive into our Television once again we were able to quickly browse through our pictures. This experience was great compared to first having to burn our photos on a disc and waiting for each file to load, the INOi Media HardDrive makes browsing through photos fast and simple.

Here is an example of a photo viewed onscreen

Next you can read the conclusion from our tests…

Software and drive installation

Conclusion