Aldi DVD Player - HDMI & USB for £35!

dc

gromituk wrote: »

Fine - I know HDMI wasn't your sole reason for buying it. I was mainly making the point to others that upscaling DVD players are a marketing gimmick, so no need to take it personally. As a scientist you will be well aware that you cannot magically produce information out of nothing.

Not entirley true in the digital age, with image enhancement, the process fills in what is not there, by an informed guess as to what should be there.

Magic

gromituk

Yes - it's called interpolation and it still doesn't create information out of nothing.

dylel

who's taking it personally?
and yes, you can make something out of nothing - how else do you explain posh spice making a career out of no talent?? :rotfl:

gromituk

dylel wrote: »

who's taking it personally?

You tell me as it's difficult to ascertain these things from the written word - I just didn't want you to think that I was singling you out for misunderstanding the irrelevance of upscalers in DVD players because I happened to quote you rather than anyone else.

iamlovejunkie

Lütz_Pangaloo wrote: »

Well I've just tried a no-name 128MB USB stick with a couple of small AVIs and some MP3s and they all played perfectly - unfortunately I haven't got an MPG small enough to fit (!) so I'll try my external 160GB drive later (it's FAT32 so should be ok).

Best way to check yours is to plug it into your PC, right click on the drive letter and select 'Properties'. In the window that opens you should see FAT32 next to 'File System'. If it's NTFS you're scuppered I'm afraid - you'll have to reformat (lose all your content) or get a new FAT32 disk and copy over everything to that.

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice just checked and it is fat32!
Have you tried your 160 gig drive yet and was it successful??
cheers

seth

For Windows users with external hard disks XP will not format large devices with FAT32.

If you want to format a large drive as FAT32 there are details here.

Be careful with the drive letter as you can wipe the wrong HD?!

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

mouseman81

Hi

I bought one of these yesterday, seems to work perfectly with discs and my 2GB Kingston pendrive.

I then tried reformatting a 160GB USB2 drive (externally powered) as Fat32 and copying a load of AVI's across. When i try and access this from the player it searches for a while and then the screen goes black and i have to reboot the player by unplugging/plugging back in.

Has anyone else had any luck with using a usb harddrive with this please?

Cheers

seth

gromituk wrote: »

No. Really, no. The law of diminishing returns applies here, and the gullible will simply be ripped off by idiotic claims about shiny branded cables. Cables are the new "extended warranties" - the things they try to lumber you with at the checkout to make their profit, having cut the cost of the headline item to the bone to appear competitive. A savvy money-saver does not fall for this and realises that the "you've spent £1k on a telly so you'll be letting it down unless you spend £100 on a SCART cable" argument is completely and utterly bogus. What you need is a cable that's not too long, and that has individually screened cores. Buy one for a fiver on eBay. That is as good as you are going to get with SCART, full stop. And it can be pretty good.

I agree spending £100 on a scart lead is mad.. I'd start with a few cheap ones and see how the picture is. For longer runs you might need to spend more. Remember you can very cheap optical interconnects on Ebay for around £4 inc postage these can cost £35 in stores!

seth

mouseman81 wrote: »

Hi

I bought one of these yesterday, seems to work perfectly with discs and my 2GB Kingston pendrive.

I then tried reformatting a 160GB USB2 drive (externally powered) as Fat32 and copying a load of AVI's across. When i try and access this from the player it searches for a while and then the screen goes black and i have to reboot the player by unplugging/plugging back in.

Has anyone else had any luck with using a usb harddrive with this please?

Cheers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

Wikipedia says that there are issues with directories on FAT32 being spread across the disk and needed a defrag. Might be worth a try?

I've just formatted a 300G drive FAT32 loading up some files will report back...

How many files did you have on the drive the player might be running out of memory with lots of files?! I had this on DVDs with 1000s of photos might be just be a huge number of files try formatting the drive and copying a few files over.

mouseman81

Thanks for the reply Seth

I ran a chkdsk after reformatting but haven't tried a defrag yet, i'll try it when i get home this evening.

I loaded the drive up with about 35GB of video, probably 150ish files with some being with folders 3 deep (eg \tv_shows\simpsons\series 4\filename.avi)

Let me know if you get any luck with yours.

Cheers
Matt