Recommend a product to play media from USB HDD please

lordrobs · 26 Jan 2006 at 12:00

Hope someone here can help.

Basically i'm after a product I can use to play my media (.avi, .mp3 etc.) which is stored on an external USB 2.0 HDD. I want to display this media on my LCD TV which has either a VGA or RGB Scart input. Obviously if I could use the VGA input at my TV's native res. of 1024x768 that would be ideal but if not RGB Scart would do.

I'd also like to be able to connect the device up to my AV Receiver which would mean wither an Optical or Coaxial connector.

Does such a thing exist or am I asking for the impossible? I see lots of wireless devices but for me it would be much easier if I could just plug my USB HDD into it.

Thanks.

lordrobs · 26 Jan 2006 at 13:41

com....pu.....ter :confused:

I had looked into making myself a little media pc but these things start getting quite expensive quite quickly

Its something I should look into more but just wondered if there was a simple off the shelf solution instead

lordrobs · 26 Jan 2006 at 15:13

Jez said:
Thing is that it wont do his TV's native resolution, so it wont look very good displayed on his LCD tv

Thats a fair point. It would be nice to have it displayed at native which is how i've got it set up at the moment in my room in my parents house. Just wanted to think about how i'm going to have it set up when I buy a place this year as I'd like to have my pc set-up in the second bedroom but be able to view stuff from my pc in the living room.

Maybe I need to re-evaluate the media pc idea. Look at second hand parts instead of new etc. might not be as expensive as I first thought.

lordrobs · 26 Jan 2006 at 15:28

TBH I had no idea you could run a vga source that far.

Would I be looking at big money for the cable assuming say 15m?

EDIT: from a bit of quick googling not as much as I thought they would be. Another option at least, depending on how the rooms end up being arranged.