Mvix Turns Laptop Drives Into Media Centers

The Mvix Ultra-Portable Media Center is like a hard drive enclosure that also lets you navigate its contents and play high-def video on a TV.

It looks like Iogear wasn’t the only company to figure out that portable hard drives could become portable high-def media centers with a little extra electronic wizardry onboard. A small U.S. company known as Mvix launched a unit very similar to Iogear’s Portable Media Player on Thursday, but with an important twist – you provide the drive.

Mvix markets its MV-2500U Ultra-Portable Media Center as a combination hard drive enclosure and media player. Since it accepts standard 2.5-inch P-ATA and IDE drives, buyers can decide how much storage they really need and buy accordingly.

Like Iogear’s player, the Mvix has no external video display, but can play stored video on TVs with its included A/V cables. It can output video up to 1080i resolution, and supports a wide variety of formats including MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, DivX3.11, 4x, 5x, XviD, DVD(IFO, VOB), and ISO. To make sifting through videos possible without kneeling in front of the TV, Mvix also includes a full-function IR remote.

Although the Mvix media center won’t ship until May 12, it can be preordered for $149 directly through the company’s online store. Even factoring in the additional cost of a drive, that still makes it a bargain beside Iogear’s $349.95 120GB competitor.