Well Maplins are selling these @ £39.99 Maplins Noontech Gigaview A50FW
First thoughts are “ouu cheep media enclosure”, I snapped it up and headed for home.
Well anyway I popped open my laptop (Ubuntu 7.10) opened up my video folder and started dropping vids on to my MSDP and XD card.
I slapped them in the enclosure (1 @ a time) and tryed to play them,
hmn these psp formatted rips didn’t work,
Downloaded avi’s didn’t work
the only thing that worked was a .mov file.
Thinking “well that’s crap” I opened up DVD::RIP and transcoded a copy of FMP EPS1 to and mpg.
copied to xd card – Didn’t work, WTF?
copied to MSDP – worked but stuttered.
Copied to some 10.8 gig hd (9.8 formatted in fat 32)
Well that works ok, that will do for me next up mp3’s
Putting the cards back where they came from I slapped some tunes from a scooter album and stated playing them.
The unit has a built in equalizer type jobbie but it was very slow keeping up with the music.
Being curious about its working I pulled out the main board and starting looking at the chips.
The biggest chip I assume Is the main driver chip and has Power media V1.0 written on it.
After a bit of google I find absolutely nothing on the technical specs of this unit, So no chance of hacking it.
The old “you get what you pay for” speaks true for this unit,
Cheep aluminium case, crap gui and slow read/write on internal hd’s.
If this could be hacked I’m sure the bugs could be fixed how ever google does show 2 different version of this unit, one with a square button, one with a round button.
Ill play with this some more and test out the vob playback and the post some more comments.
Ajb2k3's Weblog 
I also bought one of these from Maplin. It works fine as a USB connected backup drive. After that it all went downhill. I only tested it on the TV and encountered the following problems:
The file names on screen are DOS 6.3 naming convention!
Despite a mixture of AVI and MPG, none of the AVI appeared in the menu and less than 30% of the MPG files appear.
What it did show played, but FFW and REW didn’t work and after a few minutes it would skip to the next file.
E-mailed Maplin Technical and Noontec. Maplin said to return it, Noontec never bothered to answer.
So I took it back for exchange and the replacement .. doesn’t even produce a picture on the screen! Mind you, the driver CD in the box was snapped in two so it doesn’t say much for Noontec quality control. So it’s back to Maplin to get my money back!
That sounds about right for Maplin. Most of what Maplin sell these days is cheap Chinese junk sold at 20% higher prices than you can get elsewhere.
If I can my receipt mine is going back. Problems from the beginning, but somehow I’ve put up with it for three months. It now won’t play things in their entirety.
Just remembered, I didn’t get a driver with mine, or instructions (though it’s not that complicated).
There are some happy and satisfied users of this user out there, I ‘m one of them. I tried all types of solutions for getting video files to my TV. Hooking up a laptop, building a MythTV system. All of these failed to make it for one reason or another. I finally picked one of these up from Maplins for £35, with extremely low expectations.
I put a 500Mb drive in it and it’s served me well ever since. The GUI is awful to look at, i’d admit, but I spend most of my time looking at the content rather than the GUI. It is quite an idiosyncratic machine, the best way i’ve found for navigating and playing content is to use the browse files option, the icon on the right from the main menu, this lets you navigate through the folders and play a video from the menu. I’ve found that if i try and use any other options it tries to make video thumbnails on the fly, and if you’ve got more than one video file it can’t handle it, so the whole thing chokes and dies. The solution to this is only use the file view to navigate and play files.
I use this unit for 3 main areas:
1. Backed up DVDs via DVDShrink, my kids like to kill DVDs so I’ve put them on the box. If you navigate to the DVD using the file system and then press the ‘DVD play’ button you have a full on DVD player like experience navigating the DVD menus to play the videos on the DVD.
Quality: very good, small amount of artifacting, but very good playback, i’ve never had any jumps or stutters in the video.
2. Archiving of TV from my PVR – I’m constantly filling the HD on my Topfield PVR, so I copy anything I want to keep onto the A50FW, I then convert from .rec to .mpg (mpeg2) using VideoReDo (about 5 min for a 2hr movie) and it plays well on the box, even preserving the full screen anamorphic widescreen (don’t understand how this works, but i’m happy to go with it).
Quality: near similar to the picture I get from my PVR, never any stuttering.
3. Watching downloaded files, This unit seems to support a lot of the standard format download files, such as divx avi’s, I very rarely get a file that won’t play. The decoding of these can be a bit variable, video that looks good on a PC can look a bit blocky and artifacted on the box, especially in low level lighting scenes, but again i’m aware that i’m watching a video encoded with no quality control, and can equate the experience with watching dubious quality VHS tapes in my youth. If i’m enjoying the content I tend to, forget the quality, and if it’s really that good it’s an encouragement to seek out a better quality version, That said i’ve experienced some divx encodings that have been very good.
Other points.
I didn’t need the drivers disc that came with it, I plugged it into my laptop and it appeared right away as a generic USB drive. When you have it connected as a USB HD the player part turns off so you can’t copy content and watch content at the same time.
Ok, nearly finished the remote control that comes with it is a bit unresponsive, the range is poor, its easy to buffer up clicks to the device that can result in very odd things happening. But… if you understand that it’s a little wierd and work with it’s quibbles, you can get a £350 experience from a £35 box, on the other hand it could drive you mad!
N
I did mean 500Gb
well im happy with my Gigaview 3.5 750GB media player, Got it for $220 aus on ebay!
Had it for over a year now and find it way easier than burning stuff to dvd and then having to store all the dvd’s, After ripping over 400 dvd’s im pretty much out of room in my house.
I find that creating Files on the Hard drive is easier for navigation,eg, ‘MOVIES’ ‘KIDS MOVIES’ ‘MUSIC’ than placing the avi/mp3 file that ive downloaded in one of those, recently have found some stuff from torrentz will play for a few seconds than stop, Can get around this by converting that file again to a Xvid Movie (avi) with Xilisoft Video Converter or something similar!
My guess is that whoever is coverting these download dvd rips etc has changed something slighly while recoding it for it not to read properly on the Media player, Annoying sometimes but not a real big deal when you think of how much your saving in blank dvd’s, cases etc.
Thumbs up for me for Media player 🙂
I haven’t got anymore then copying vobs due to being on linux and having a small hd in it.
I’ll get back down sometime and look into it.
hi can you help me pls i have brought one of these media players and it is recognising it on the computer but nothin on the tv at all no menus screen anything – no driver disc in the box either – is there a programme i can download or get to rectify this ???????
Thanks Lindsey
I too had this first time I ran the run after prolonged power off.
You need to change the display output (there a button on the controller)
Press the button several times and eventually you may get an output.
Also check the connections, some time mine plays up.