Dvico TViX HD M-4000 PA - First impressions
So, it’s arrived and it’s awesome.
I ordered the TViX from KJ Global, who appear to currently be the only UK stockists, and a 750GB Seagate Barracuda HDD from Dabs. Doing it this way saved me about �60 on buying one from KJ with the drive already fitted. Fitting the drive was extremely simple; a small flap on the side of the TViX pops open (a bit like a battery compartment on a walkman) and you simply screw the drive guide onto the drive (2 screws) and slide the drive in. You then plug in the ribbon cables and you’re away. It took me all of 5 minutes.
Setting it up was just as simple. The TViX comes with all the cables you need, so I hooked it up to my PowerBook’s USB2 and�formatted the drive to FAT32 (the misleadingly-named ‘MS-Dos Filesystem’) using Apple’s Disk Utility, which took about 20 minutes. Once this was done, the TViX just appeared in the Finder like a normal drive and I was able to copy my DV content onto it by simple drag-and-drop.
Finally, I hooked it up to my TV using the supplied composite video cable and, with baited breath, powered it up. It�worked like a charm; browsing the folder structure via menus on the TV screen from the comfort of my sofa, I kicked off the episode of The Wire I had ripped from DVD and it played it quite happily. It seems to handle AVI and MPEG files no problem at all.
My only gripe is actually more of a Mac thing than a TViX thing. When accessing the TViX from my PowerBook, OSX leaves a mess of resource fork files all over the drive in the form of ‘invisible’ files. Unfortunately, these files aren’t invisible to the TViX, so they’re a bit annoying. I can’t imagine it’s going to be much of a stretch to write a little shell script or something to tidy them up though, and if that’s all the messing about that I have to do then I think I’ve got away quite lightly.
The next stage is to look into networking (it has a built-in Ethernet port and can be wireless with an adapter)�and to pick up the digital TV tuner add-on�so that I can use it to record TV straight to the box. There are so many possibilities for this bit of kit that I’m really quite excited to explore them all.�
COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS
TVIX Box, May 30 07 at 10:15 amGreat write-up! We have been selling the TVIX Box 4000 series in the US and customers are very, very happy. Thanks for this post, now we know who to refer our UK orders too.
Thanks,
Paul Valente
http://www.tvixbox.com
tismey, Jun 01 07 at 10:38 amAs an update to my comment about resource-fork files, it seems that the TViX ignores any files with extensions that it doesn’t recognise, so the only time that these hidden files become an issue is when they have a file extension such as .mpg or .avi, or when they are a folder, such as .Trashes.
So as long as you don’t trash or rename any files on the box via Mac OSX, this isn’t an issue.
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