For all the fluff that generally pours out of Brando’s website, there’s always a diamond in the rough here and there. This one seems to be more diamond than rough. It’s basically an adapter that turns any 3.5- or 2.5-inch hard drive into an HD video player for your TV. It’ll also push out files from SD cards and USB thumb drives as well.
It’s priced at $69, which seems a bit steep, mostly because I’m going to assume that the on-screen interface is average (at best). The idea is still intriguing, though, especially if you have a bunch of media files spread out over multiple storage mediums.
Video is output at 1080i and the adapter can read MPEG, AVI, MP4, VOB, and DiVX files, so codec support looks pretty robust. You also get a remote control and AV cables and the adapter doubles as a USB external connection for hooking your drive up to your computer.
SATA HDD Multi-Media Player Adapter [Brando]
Have you seen their shipping costs? I can buy a much better dock for less money than this thing, and have eSATA and Firewire 800 in the offing.
Oh noooo! $3.00, are they crazy charging that!
I ran thru checkout, and the shipping fees are a whopping $3usd.
I would be far more interested in seeing review of actual users. How good/bad is the interface, how are the codes *really*. Can codecs be added? You know, the things that really define usability.