Like many of you, I’ve collected a little bit of media from the internet. Video clips, video podcast, you tube videos and all other types of media there is to be downloaded online. The problem is I’m tired of watching all of these things on my PC. I could buy an Apple TV, but then I would have to go through all of the trouble of converting those video files to an Apple TV compatible format, which is time consuming. I can buy one of those portable MP3 players that allow you to connect the player to your television to view your video files…like the iPod, or Creative Zen. An iPod has the same problem as the Apple TV where I have to convert most files, and I own a Zen….which works without converting most files but there are some small problems with that also.

The product Im going to talk about today is one I mentioned a while ago, and finally had a chance to actually play around with it. It’s called the Lasonic HV-670.

What is that you ask?

Well simply put, it is a hard drive based DVD player. It has 2 modes of playing media. First there’s a DVD player, which is also DIVX certified. The second mode, which is the mode that makes this player special, is its hard drive playing capabilities. There is a removable hard drive included that you can store all of your media files. And those files can be played on the player. Sounds like a solution to get some of those media files you have on your PC to your television. Want to hear about how it works? Here we go…

The Specs:

This product was bought at Newegg for $149.99. What’s included is the player itself, a 250 gig removable hard drive, a remote, and a few cables to get it connected to your TV (and PC). Of course, like I said it plays DVD movies and Divx movies through the DVD player. In HDD mode it is said to play many video formats (without converting) some of these formats include: Mpeg 1-2-4, Divx, Xvid, Vcd, Svcd, and DVD ISO files. And of course it will display pictures.

As far as the outputs, there is only the plain Jane RCA av cables included, but it does support s-video and component. It doesn’t upconvert to HD but it does do progressive scan.

The Hard drive is basically a 3.5” hard drive in a USB enclosure. It connects to your PC through USB 2.0 and it has a proprietary slot that connects it to the DVD Player when you slide it into the little compartment.

The unit:

At first glance, the Lasonic HV-670 looks pretty slick. It has a shiny chrome face, a little larger than most DVD players on the market today, but not really a huge player. To the left front of the player is a door that hides the hard drive. The hard drive itself is in a pretty standard looking enclosure. It has a locking mechanism that keeps it in place when the drive is inserted into the DVD player. It slides in and out of the player pretty easily. The only grip I have is when you connect it to your PC; you must use a external power adapter. Also, you cannot have it connected to your PC and the DVD player at the same time (which would’ve been really great).

The remote is a pretty standard universal remote, nothing too special there. It pretty much has all of the functionality that you would expect.

Over all, this feels like a budget DVD player, not necessarily like it was cheaply made, but it isn’t anything that feels “high end”.

The DVD player:

As far as the DVD portion of the player, it is a pretty standard DVD player. The picture quality is acceptable and it had no problems playing Divx files burned to a DVD. But we all know that if you buy this player, the DVD portion of the Lasonic HV-670 isn’t what we bought it for.

Playing files from the HDD:

Getting files from your PC to the HDD is easy enough, just like any other USB HDD, you just connect it to your PC then you can start transferring files over.  It has 250 gigs of space so there was no way I would fill it with the media files I had. So I just transferred a decent amount of video in different formats to the HDD.

When you want to play files from the HDD, there is a handy button on the remote that switches it from DVD mode to HDD mode. Once you’re in HDD mode, a navigation menu appears on the screen that allows you to browse your files.

Right off the bat I notice one problem, and that is that it doesn’t display the full title of the files if it gets too long. I had the Wayans Bros season 1 DVD box set that I converted to Divx for testing. Each episode of the season was labeled like this “Wayans Bros Season 1 Episode 1.avi” and so on. When I looked into the Wayans Bros folder on the Lasonic, there was a list that looked like this “Wayans Bros Sea”. So I didn’t know which episode was which. I figured there would be a way to change the view to show the full file name, but I didn’t find any way.

As far as playing the files, I tried out all of the formats that the specs listed were compatible and they all played without a hitch. The quality of the video was surprisingly good considering that I was using files that were meant to be displayed on a small window with a 55” television.

Another thing I noticed is that when you use the HDD for about 30 mins or more, the device gets pretty warm.  I would guess that over time this may be a problem but It didn’t get so hot that I felt watching about 2-4 hours of video would be bad.

Conclusion:

Over all I think the Lasonic HV-670 is a fairly decent unit. 250 gigs of space is plenty for most people. The only thing I wish this could do is either have the HDD connected to the PC and DVD player at the same time or maybe add a Ethernet or WIFI connection to your pc to either transfer or stream files.

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