Rimax HDDivX review

If you want to watch movies on your PC and store them on your hard disk, you'll first need to encode them into a form that your PC can read.

Among the most popular of these is a format called DivX. Using this, you can compress even long films down to just a few megabytes in size without losing too much quality. This makes it ideal for storing lots of films, and for sharing movies over the Internet.

Once you've got your huge collection of DivX films, you could just watch it on your PC. But wouldn't it be more comfortable to sit on the couch with your feet up? That's exactly what Rimax's HDDivX allows you to do.

It looks and works like a simple hard drive. Like any portable hard disk it connects to your computer using USB 2, and is powered directly by the PC's USB 2 socket. This means you don't need a separate power cable when you're using it with your computer. Because the PC recognises HDDivX as a generic disk drive, you can use it to store any file type. Those who'd like it to double as a hard disk won't be disappointed either. Transfer speeds were good, with a rate of 7.14 megabytes a second (MB/s) when writing to the drive, and 8.3MB/s when reading from it. This isn't as fast as our current Best Buy, but it's not bad.

Compared to most portable hard disks, though, the HDDivX has a few tricks up its sleeve. If you plug it into a TV, it turns into a portable media player that you can use to watch DivX movies and listen to tunes encoded as MP3 files. We tried it on a portable TV with a 28in screen. Quality was surprisingly good - not up to the standard of a DVD movie disc, but roughly on a par with watching a VHS tape. But be aware that the more you compress your film, and the larger the screen you view it on, the more visibly blocky the picture will be.

Composite video and audio cables are supplied with the device, but sadly there's no SCART adapter. This was annoying, as we needed one in the end to get the device working. Other than this minor problem, setting the HDDivX up was simplicity itself. We simply plugged it into the telly, switched to the AV channel and it worked. The user interface is simple, allowing you to browse through the folders on the player's hard disk to look for playable files.

You'd have to have lots of DivX movies to make this a worthwhile purchase, but if you're a film enthusiast who likes to take their collection on the move with them, this little device will be a godsend.