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VOX TV-R HDD Media Player/Recorder
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Firmware
The firmware VOX implemented in the TV-R is very simplistic, goal oriented, and initiative. I did not need to read the manual in order to figure out where to press when I wanted to do something. One things I found odd about the firmware is the way in which the links on the front page forwarded me to the submenues. When I clicked on "FILE", I was forwarded to the C:/ directory (C being the drive name although different from what the computer called it). If I clicked on "MOVIE", I was shown the same C:/ directory instead of the "MOVIE" folder as you can see in the right picture. After playing around with the menues for a while, I found out that when I selected a particular option, such as "Music" the TV-R would filter out all the non "Misic" formats. The "File" option displayed all the formats.
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Recording, Output and HD Content Tests
To first test out the TV-R, I decided to upload a high definition Heroes Season 2 episode and play it on a 720p TV. The file was 50 minutes long and occupied approximately 800 mb. The results were much better than I expected. While some players and older computers have trouble rendering large files which is what I was expecting from the TV-R, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that such was not the case. The scenes were rendered at superb quality and a great frame rate.
With high expectations in mind, I decided to test out the recording capabilities of the TV-R. There are three quality settings available for recording content: High, Medium, Low. A 30 second recording of a DTV broadcasted signal took up 6.13 MB, 3.85 MB, and 2.43 MB for High, Med, and Low settings respectfully. The differences in quality become more apparent between High and Medium and less apparent between Medium and Low. Overall the TV-R did an excellent job recoding video.
The same, however, can not be said about the audio quality. On all three recordings, the audio was grainy and slightly higher pitch than the original. This situation occurred only during playback of recorded content. During the playback of Heroes, the audio sounded crisp and full of depth.
REALTIME PRICING ON EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES