Cool Usb Toys

With more and more electronic media getting available to us I was looking for a way of putting it on my TV instead of on my computer.

My first idea was getting an Apple TV but I didn’t really want to spend the money on it. But then I ran in to the NBOX player.

The NBOX is not an Apple TV and does not even come close. But it plays electronic media by in an easy way.

OK what is the NBOX Media Player. The NBOX is basically an player without any storage and that they solve by adding an SD slot on one side (Supports SD HC) and on the other side they have and USB port where you can connect your Flash Drives or external hard drives. As you can see at this little video.

But let me start at the beginning.

The NBOX Media Player comes in a sleek white box with in there of course the NBOX, a small power supply to power the NBOX, a sleek and small black remote, AV Cable and a manual. Beside this my supplyer NBOXPLAYER also includes an Y/PB/PR Component Cable and about that later more.

Connecting the NBOX is really easy just follow the pictures on the box or in the manual and you will be ready to go in less then a minute. Using the default AV cable gives a pretty good picture but if you use the ext Y/PB/PR cable you will notice the difference it is accutally very easy to spot when you see the default NBOX screen.

The Nbox as many product coming from China have way to many things they do and in my idea they are kinda useless. The nbox for instance lets you open documents but NO PDF’s but really are you gone read documents on your screen. It also plays music and I guess that could be nice but I normally don’t listen to music through my TV. Then the NBOX lets you watch pictures and that could be fun to show friends you holiday snaps. But for this review I will just focus on the in my view the only real feature and that is watching movies.

it is all pretty easy if you have files in the right format (about that more later) just put the movies on for instance a Flash drive and plug it in. As soon as you plug it in you will see USB with a flash drive icon showing up now you can just browse to the file of the movie you want to watch and when you have selected it but not clicked through you will see a preview of the file starting on the right to make it easy to find the right file.

And then it is easy just select the right file and it will start playing. The included remote is nice and small and extremly responsive so very nice to work with when you watch a movie.

The NBOX has a really need feature. When you watch a movie and you want to stop for whatever reason just turn it off and next time when you turn it on it will go on where you left off. Have said that I normally unplug all my TV related equipment and in that case it does not always remember where I left it, it seems as the machine forgets without power after a couple of days. And in the case you completly unplug the NBOX it has the nasty habit to automatically boot up even if I don’t want to use it.

So what does the NBOX Media player play?

It plays Divx, Xvid, AVI and VOB (copy of files on a DVD) that is what i got working. They say it plays Mpeg-1 and Mpeg-2 that I didn’t test and it says it plays MOV and MP4 that I tested and in my case did not work. And that is ashame because that is what I use in iTunes and my iPhone.

Conclusion: I love the NBOX and can’t really imagine live without it. I have the movies I want to watch on a small external harddrive that seems to work without extra power (be prepared to give you harddrive power the manual states that it does not supply enough power for all drives)

I would recommend the NBOX without must hestation and would recommend  the extra video cable to make you video quality a lot higher (720p)

Go look for a good NBOX Media Player Deal.