This makes it a whole lot faster to test files by just chucking them on a thumb drive. I cannot discern any playback difference between the same file on the midte's hard drive or a USB stick. stick with divx 5 or older and you'll be fine. Any divx or xvid encoded around 1500kbs or higher pretty much just refuses to play at all and the player can't handle files encoded under divx 6. The bigger the resolution of the file (for the same given bit rate) the more pronounced the problem becomes. Playback will start to get choppy and I experience audio synch problems at bitrates higher than about 1100kbs for divx and about 750 kbs for Xvid. I deal mainly with Divx and Xvid encoded files.
CBR audio plays back smoother then VBR on the midte, regardless of format, stick with 44.1 or 48 khz and 2 channel as encoding options. Some of my 128 AC3 sound in vids works fine, yet other vids encoded at the same audio bit rate will not work. Also it seems that the player can only handle some kinds of AC3 codec. Any video stream with higher bit rate audio than those will not output sound on my unit. It will play mp3's up to about 224kbs but does far worse with AC3 where 128kbs is the limit. the player is touchy with encoded audio in a video stream. Occasionally I'll get one to work (one of the star wars ones does) but 95% of them either won't play or if they do playback, you will get no sound. DVD file playback from native vob files is really sketchy to say the least. the player will not recognise any more then 8 files in a folder, any extra ones will not show up in the menu.
Anything with an MP4 file extension will not even be recognised by the player. MP4's wont work unless they are inside an AVI container. I've tried both version 8 and 9 encoded vids and the player only picks them up as wma audio files, can't play them if you try to.
Remember we are talking about playback via RCA patch cords here, others have reported better success using the HDMI output to a Hi definition TV, especially for viewing DVD files.
I used an old USB printer cable that had the square type fitting on one end. Use the USB port on the rear that is far more square looking than the other regular USB port. Any larger and they will not transfer to the drive.Īll thats left to do now is to transfer your video files to the unit. Remember that using the FAT 32 platform, individual file sizes are restricted to 4gb.
Folk are reporting success by using a third party formatting software called swiss knife. This is a problem for big hard drives and windows cannot format them to FAT 32 by itself. I quickly discovered that other folk were having major drama with their players if the hard drive installed in it was not formatted to FAT32. The vids were many and varied in their sizes, file formats and audio streams, allowing me to come to some pretty solid conclusions regarding what the unit will play and what it can't.
USB connectivity to a PC is good at USB 2.0 speeds and I initially dumped over 500 vids onto it. I've got mine set up with RCA cords going to a big ass old CRT television for video and my surround amp for audio. The unit can also act as an external hard drive enclosure for backing up your files. It will also play MP3 collections and do photo slideshows. its dirt cheap for starters and it will play Divx and Xvid movies and play them pretty well. If you've got your hands on one of these like me then you'll want to read on, alot of the ground work is already done for you and we'll get to the core of the problems and discover solutions that actually work. there's the good, the bad and the ugly with this player but I'm still persevering with it because I love a challenge. The drive alone was worth more to buy seperately so I snapped it up thinking "how bad can it really be" ? The player is a Midte MDT-PM368HS, its a cheap and nasty chinese box from ebay but it came with a 1tb western digital hard drive pre installed and was dirt cheap.
I was stoked to find an external hard drive enclosure that doubled as a movie player I could connect to my TV and watch divx, xvid, wmv, mp4, etc etc. TESTING AND REVIEW OF THE MIDTE HARD DRIVE MULTIMEDIA PLAYER MDT-PM368HS DUDEWORLD - Midte multimedia player Review