GadgetCentre (mmmm, tastes Britishy) took the MediaMan HVX-3500 out for a spin and came back very satisfied.
https://gizmodo.com/savitmicro-mediaman-109448
The MediaMan is basically just a housing for a 3.5″ hard drive that can play back tons of video and audio formats: “MPEG-1 (AVI, MPG); MPEG-2 (AVI, VOB), ISO, IFO; MPEG-4 (AVI, DivX 3.11, 4.xx, 5.xx. XviD) DivX subtitle (SRT, SMI, Embedded Multiple Subtitle) and Audio – WAV, MP3, MPEG-4(AAC), WMA, OGG Vorbis, AC3, DTS.” That’s a lot.
Also, the MediaMan has lots of connectors so you can hook it up to almost any display. Composite, S-Video, Component, DVI, coax, optical audio, and 5.1 channel audio are all supported. That makes for a rear-panel more holey than Jesus’s underpants.
You can stick any 3.5″ hard drive inside, which makes this expandable as larger hard drives are released. The only downside is that it doesn’t play back iTunes’ m4a, and there’s no WMV support. The WMV support could be remedied by a firmware upgrade, but iTunes support would probably need some licensing and deals with Apple, so don’t hold your breath for that one.
Update: Reader Sam tells us that all you need to do to play the iTunes downloaded songs is change the extension from .m4a to .mp4. That’s it!
Review: MediaMan HVX-3500 [GadgetCentre via PlayEngine]
