Digital Home Thoughts: The DVX-POD: Great Idea, Poor Execution

Setup & Installation
Setting up the DVX-POD was extremely simple – I just connected the USB sync and AC power cables, and the device showed up as a removable storage drive in My Computer. Curiously, the review information I was given indicated that both the sync and power cables should be connected – I think both cables are required because the screen and hard drive draw significant power, likely more than USB can provide. But this puts a crimp on the ability to easily go mobile with the device – you have to lug along the AC power adaptor in order to connect it to a desktop computer. Because it functions like a removable hard drive, I was able to drag and drop files easily to and from the DVX-POD, and create directories on the device to organize my digital media.


Figure 5: The software interface for moving content to and from the DVX-POD

The software was better than I expected – quite often with gadgets like this, the hardware is killer but the software is weak. MManager, the software used to control the DVX-POD, isn't very complex: it shows you your local hard drive on the right, and the DVX-POD drive on the right. You can move over one or more files, and the software will tell you the capacity remaining on the drive. There's a media preview window that (I think) is supposed to show you a preview of your file, but I was never able to get it working with either files on my local dive or on the DVX-POD.

Another glitch is the mysterious MyList feature. I believe it’s meant to be a folder where audio files are stored for playback during slide shows. Browsing via the desktop, the folder is empty. When browsing through MManager, there were several files in the folder. Exactly how this feature works is unknown because there’s no help file or logical user interface to explain what it does.

On-Device Options
There are several ways to configure the DVX-POD from the central setup screen – the brightness can be adjusted from 10% up to 90%. In my highly-scientific "go into the bathroom, close the door and turn off the lights" test, there was no difference in brightness between 10% and 20%, while 30% and 40% settings produced noticeable flickering that my wife could see from five feet away without her contact lenses in – it was quite bad. Cranking it up to 50% eliminated the flickering, but there was no difference in actual brightness between 50% and 90%. The backlight can be set to turn off after 60 seconds, 180 seconds, or it can be turned off manually. The unit itself can be set to power off after 10 minutes or 30 minutes. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn off the screen but have the unit keep working – this is something I’ve grown accustomed to on my Pocket PCs when playing music, so this seems like a strange omission.


Figure 6: The icon for the Setup screen shows some of the rough edges on the user interface. This looks like a transparent GIF with the wrong colour made transparent.

There’s a software switch to move between NTSC and PAL output, making this device usable with TV sets all around the world. The setup screen also includes settings for the video recorder: you can select between Low, Middle, and High quality. There was no easy way to see the resolution and/or bit rate – in the sample video file that I recorded at High quality, the resulting video file was 704 x 240 and a bit rate of 1740 kbps. At least, that’s what Windows Media Player was reporting it as. Playing back the file with Windows Media Player and taking a screen shot, I get a resolution of roughly 706 x 483. Playing back the same file with ACDSee 7.0 gives me a stretched file at 704 x 240. The DVX-POD is likely creating malformed headers on the video file which tell media player applications what resolution the file really is.

Audio recording settings are either Low (48 kbps MP3), Middle (96 kbps MP3) or High (192 kbps MP3). The final setting the user can control is the slide show auto advance: 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, or no auto advance.