Auto CD Mp3 Player

Review from Bron

Time August 10, 2010 at 2:07 pm

Works as advertised. Ugly, basic interface, but it works. Has played my mp3s and the few videos I tried so far fine.

720p component out, very tiny and very portable, a great gadget to throw in your travel bag. Has a VGA/D-Sub port so you can hook it up to a monitor and have your own cheap HDTV. Plays RM RMVB files which is rare. Plays most common formats, actually. (I tried mostly std def xvid which worked fine.) Composite output was fine. Also has S-Video.

Remote is weak and response to commands sluggish. Very limited features. Basically just highlight file and play. Has a preview window for videos and a visualization window for MP3 playback.

Thumbs down at near $100 price, but you can often find it for half that and at that price its a decent value.

P.S. If you get one and hook it up, all your video will be in B&W dont panic! You need to change the output to NTSC composite, component, or whatever, it defaults to PAL. Guess it was sold mostly in Europe.

Update 8/12/2009

Has an SD card slot plus the USB port. Can get some high capacity SD cards fairly cheap now, so thats a nice feature (also for photos). Can play background music during your photo slideshow. Fairly quick at displaying the photos. Nothing fancy, though.

Has nice aspect control. One button on remote will cycle through various 4:3 and 16:9 settings including ZOOM and I was able to get all the videos Ive tried so far to display properly. Decent FFW and REW speeds, OSD button will display an On Screen Display of controls for playback (or just use buttons on remote). Decent quality, but not much, if any, post-processing other than scaling that I could tell. Has copy and delete functions, file browser, and text file display on screen readable. Not sure how much anyone would use it, but maybe you put a text file in folders describing the material there? Might be useful sometimes.

No playlists, though, no shuffle for mp3s, just repeat. Typical crummy manual. Not mentioned in manual, but apparently you should stop playing files before going into standby or can sometimes hang unit. But only happened a couple of times.

Not a good choice for main player by any stretch, but a decent gadget for travel and fooling around. Basically works if you can live with limitations.

Update 8/13/2009

Will display Photos with random wipes (transitions) and play mp3s in the background. Photo display worked pretty well, nothing fancy, but decent and better than many devices Ive tried. You do not have any control over the music, you start the photo display, then press the background music button on the remote and it starts playing mp3s in order in the first folder of mp3s found. Not great, but perfectly fine for casual use. It has controls for manually rotating photos (which it does quickly), but no auto-rotation.

A BIG plus for this little gadget is that the USB port is fully powered. So a USB-powered hard disk drive will work fine. (The device itself uses AC power.) I tried a 400 GB unit and it worked flawlessly. The device also has functions to delete and copy files which could be useful occasionally, but I have not tried those functions yet. You can have a lot of movies, photos and music at the ready. You will need to put some thought into how you organize them on the drive, though, as navigation is simple folders and files based. Perfectly workable, though.

I tested RMVB format video files tonight and they played fine. This is one of the few devices Ive seen at this price point that supports RMVB (and RM). It plays DivX/Xvid files very well, FFW and REW work well which is a plus over a lot of other cheaper units which typically do not. (Again, Im assuming you only pay around $50 or less, this item is simply not worth the full price compared to much better units at that price point.) The sound quality seems fine, Ive listened to a lot of different mp3s and they all sounded fine.

Its a shame they did not spend just a bit more time polishing the interface. Just a few tweaks would have made a big difference. As it is, it works, but it feels clunky at every turn. And did I mention ugly?

Update 8.14.2009

Tried a USB HUB with 2 8-GB USB Flash drives attached and it worked! Main Menu shows 2 separate USB devices and both worked fine. I did not try a USB powered drive as the hub was not a powered hub. But as mentioned above a USB-powered HDD worked fine attached to the M101 USB port. Thats a big win for this device.

Have played a lot more movies and no problems so far mostly DivX/Xvid- on a couple the audio slipped out of sync, but pausing and restarting fixed it. That problem is common to Xvid and many of these devices and only happened on a couple (downloaded from the net) and on none that I had encoded myself.

Tip you press Exit to get back to the Video-Music-Photos-Files menu while a movie is playing. Or you can press the Menu button, but it always goes to the setup menu, so I find using Exit better.

In the Photo slideshow with Music mode, it searches your device (e.g. a USB drive) and will display all the photos found and play all the music files on the drive. You can select photos from a thumbnail display, and once you start the slideshow you can call up basic OSD playback controls for the photos, but there does not seem to be anyway to control the music playback during the slideshow(e.g. to skip a song). A minor nit, but worth noting. (If you have nested directories, it appears to play the top level first, then the 2nd level, then 3rd, and so on.)

Rating: 3 / 5

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