Mustek PVR H140 review

Mustek's PVR H140 is one of a growing breed of handheld media centres trying to be all things to all people, acting as video and music player, portable photo album and hard disk.

The PVR H140 significantly undercuts the competition and its 40GB hard disk is big enough for a large collection of audio, video and picture files. Media can be transferred to the hard disk via the supplied USB cable, using a Secure Digital (SD) or MultiMedia Card (MMC), or recorded directly to the unit from an audio and composite video source.

Transferring audio is easy, as the H140 supports both MP3 and WMA formats. Transferring files is as simple as dragging and dropping the music on the Mustek icon in Windows. The player supports only JPEG images, but other formats can be quickly converted and resized by the player's transfer software. Unfortunately the H140's video support leaves much to be desired. Any video transferred to the player has to be converted to the player's internal format, but the supplied software is fussy about the formats it converts. More than once we found the software refused to convert a file, even if it was a standard MPEG2 file.

When we finally found an MPEG file the software was happy to convert, we weren't impressed with the results: the PVR H140's playback was jerky and unwatchable. We could get satisfactory results only by using Windows Media Video (WMV) source files. Even then, compression errors and artefacts were clearly visible. The conversion process is also painfully slow. A 15-minute video clip took over two hours to convert on a 4 2.5GHz Pentium PC, so converting an entire DVD is quite impractical.

Using the player is no easier. The button layout is confusing and there is little sense as to which button does what at any time. The poor-quality screen makes images look washed-out and indistinct, and the constant flickering could give you a headache. Music playback through the supplied headphones is tinny and lacking in bass. Our player also had a habit of crashing frequently.

Even at this price, the PVR H140 is poor value. Getting media content on the player is a mission of gargantuan proportions and once it's there the poor screen and audio quality ruin it. The unit works well as a portable hard disk, but you can buy one of those for a third of the price of the PVR H140.