Product Reviews

Many people are building up massive libraries of media in their homes. In the good old days, this would have consisted of teetering piles of vinyl records, comic books in low, dust-covered mounds and endless unlabelled VHS cassettes that would deny any attempt at classification.

Thankfully in the new digital age we can all have embarrassingly huge and geeky collections of whatever we fancy, without upsetting those we live with. The computing industry has come up with several clever technologies to get these collections off our study-bound PCs and into our living rooms: media centre PCs, wireless home networking and DivX players to name a few.

Freecom's Mediaplayer-3 approaches the problem from a simpler angle. It is a 160GB external hard disk that can play a range of common media files. First, you plug

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it into your PC and copy your media files to it. Then you carry it down to the living room and plug it into your TV or stereo to enjoy your movies, photos or audio files.

This is more straightforward than setting up a home network and using a device such as Pinnacle's Showcenter, though not nearly so slick and satisfying as having your media networked wirelessly around your house.

The Mediaplayer has two other advantages. It gives you an extra 160GB of storage to fill, and you can take it on the road with you. There is also a choice of composite or S-video output for video, and optical S/PDIF or minijack out for audio. If you don't have S-video you can get an S-video-to-SCART lead, which will be compatible with most TVs. The Mediaplayer supports MPEG 1, 2 and 4 as well as DivX and Xvid formats, and comes with a full copy of Dr DivX so you can encode from DVDs. Even better, it supports DVD VOB files, so you can rip a DVD straight to the Mediaplayer.

Video quality was fine through S-video; we watched several sequences from Star Wars encoded to DivX and played them back on a large LCD TV. But when handling audio files, you can't queue up one audio track while listening to another.

Freecom's Mediaplayer is a decent way to get media off your PC and into your living room, especially if you need to take it further afield, or the idea of setting up a home network doesn't appeal.