Product Description

The TVisto Multimedia Center is not just any old external hard drive enclosure - it's so much more! Imagine putting all your videos and music on one convenient device, and then plugging that device into your television for playback - that's the TVisto Multimedia Center! It even offers a remote control for ease of use - you just add a hard drive and go!!! The TVisto Multimedia Center offers extra capacity for large files, allowing you to store plenty of data, music, photos and even complete movie collections. The TVisto 3500TVIS is compatible with any standard IDE Hard Drive up to 500 GB, thats a lot of movies! The TVisto 3500TVIS Multimedia Center produces high quality video and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround audio for your pleasure. With lightning-fast USB 2.0 or Firewire 400, the TVisto offers hot plug and play, super-speedy data transfer and remarkable versatility. Instant backup! Instant storage! Instant Fun!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32956 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Tvisto
• Model: 3500TVIS

Features

• 3.5" IDE hard drive up to 500GB supported
• USB 2.0 High Speed interface, Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a) interface
• Audio: WAV, MP3, MPEG-4 (AAC), WMA, AC3, OGG
• Playback Media Formats Video: MPEG-1 (AVI, MPG), MPEG-2 (AVI, VOB), ISO, MPEG-4 (AVI, DivX, DivX VOD, XviD)
• Video Outputs: NTSC/PAL Composite Video, S-Video, Analog YPbPr Component Video*, SCART RGB*, VGA (1024x768)*, HDTV (480p, 720p, 1080i)* -- * Uses proprietary TYPE cables (not included) for component YPbPr, SCART, and VGA video out functionality

Customer Reviews

Divx 6.x not compatible
most of these multimediaplayer harddrives are NOT compatible with the Divx 6.x standards out there for about a year now, and as well NOT compatible with the new quicktime 4 format also used by most pros out there.
in contradiction to what they advertise for ....

but these items are usually "ONLY" compatible with older Divx version up to 5.x, which needless to say, NO ONE uses any more for a year now.

so dont be surprised if your downloaded avi or divx or mov movies from the internet just will not play, and also dont be suprised if customer service is not reachable , and if it is, then they will only very reluctantly admit to the lack of compatibility of their players.

if you are not sure, call the manufacturers guys, ask them about this, and let them know what we consumers need...

Great for the road. Good in the home, although a little outdated.
I used this as a primary media player on my home TV for about a year before I began building HTPCs. It worked well and I had very few complaints about it.

I was able to put up to a 500GB drive in mine and it played back most all of my DivX and XviD encoded movies. I'm not into music, but I know it will play most of the more common formats.

Setup is not overly difficult, but is a little tricky to make the settings stick (especially for audio). Menus are simple, yet effective, and there are some decent playback controls available while viewing videos.

There are plenty of output options available, with even more if purchased separately (component for HD, for example). S-Video, Composite, analog stereo, and optical S/PDIF are all standard. There is also USB and Firewire ports for transferring your media.

Updates for the device are probably long gone as newer models have far surpassed what this is capable of. However, if you want simple and inexpensive (as this one should be now), it's a good device to take on vacations or weekend trips since the common hookups will attach to most hotel TVs without a hitch. This makes it great if you have kids and want to bring all their favorite shows (if you encode them, like I do).

On the downside, the device is a little slow to respond to the remote at times. Not a big deal, but it is there. Also, it will only take specifically encoded files, meaning certain features of supported formats will make it incompatible with the TVISTO (GMC/QPEL in XviD, for example). I would have also liked AVC playback, but I realize this is an older device and AVC was not as popular when I bought this.

Almost there...
I recently bought the Tvisto and am mostly pleased with it. Mostly, because I am one of those people that believes that when I buy an item it should work as described right from the box. Tvisto MOSTLY does. But not quite. First you have to install the hard drive. No big deal. I put in a 250GB. It installed fine. Next I loaded video, music, and pictures from my system to the Tvisto. That went pretty easy. When hooked up to your system via USB it is essentially an external drive. I had the jumper set to Master. No problem. Hooking it up to the TV and getting it to work as described...that's a different story. My remote would not work at all until I did a hard reboot of the Tvisto a couple times. Suddenly, it worked. Takes a while to boot up and show up on the TV screen. However, the Tvisto would not play many of my video files. I have many movies as .avi files. It would play some, and not others. I don't know enough about the files systems to know why. I only know it would not work. But wait, buried there in the manual was something about Firmware updates. I had to power down the Tvisto, hook it back up to the computer, then hunt for the firmware upgrade. It takes a while to find. [...]
GMG, apparently, is the manufacturer. The upgrade was from November 2006, so it seemed pretty recent. I downloaded the file, unzipped it and put the 3 files in the Firmware directory on the Tvisto drive. Shlepped the whole thing back to the TV (really need 2 power cables), did the Firmware update, as described. It went fine. And voila, the Tvisto would now read all the video files! Since then it pletty much has worked fine. Occaisionally the thing will freeze, in that it will not respond to the romote or to the buttons on the unit. It continues to play, but will not respond. It requires a hard shut-down and reboot to regain remote functionality. This is a kluge that should have been fixed before shipment. Also, it would be nice to have visuals while lsitening to the music files, but this is only a wish. It is nowhere stated it can do this. All in all, it's nice not to have to burn DVDs to watch videos anymore. I now have almost a hundred videos on the drive and it basically plays them all fine (except for the occasional remote nonresponse thing mentioned above).
Worth the money ($...). Hell yeah. No longer need to buy DVD blanks. Could they have done a better job on it. Again, yes. Maybe in a future firmware upgrade.
BTW, the company I bought it from has NEVER once responded to any of my queries. Their price was good, but their customer service stinks. I guess you get what you pay for.