By Melvin Seah

I USED to watch my digital videos on my tiny laptop screen because I was simply too lazy to hook up the laptop to the TV set.

But the Astone Media Gear AP-360T could change things.

The media player makes it unnecessary to get the laptop to the living room and hook it up to the TV.

Once your video footage is saved in the drive, just plug it into the device - a black box about the size of a hardcover novel - hook it up to the TV and you are good to go.

The AP-360T let me instantly watch all my videos (which were in all manner of formats like ISO, divX, XVID, avc1, mpgv, MPEG1/2/4, WMV, H.264, photojpeg and flv) directly off the USB hard drive.

Other than playing videos, the media player had other tricks up its sleeve, like the ability to pause and record live TV.

As these did not work with an external USB drive, I installed a 3.5-inch hard drive inside the gadget and hooked my cable set-top box to it.

Installing the hard drive involved working only a few screws; all the necessary connectors were included in the package.

After that, the media player worked like a dream.

Menus were easy to navigate with the supplied remote control.

Whenever I had to, say, make a cup of coffee or take a toilet break, all I had to do was to press the 'pause' button, then hit 'play' when I came back.

Lots of connectivity choices like component, composite, HDMI, coaxial, S/PDIF and RCA connectors make it easy to connect the gadget to the TV and audio-visual system. An included cable lets you connect the cable TV's set-top box to the media player.

Advanced users can tweak the gadget to act as a network player too, so you can stream video and audio files from the PC or Network Attached Storage from anywhere in the home to the player. You must get an optional Wi-Fi dongle from Astone for this.

Playback quality from my high-definition video files was very good. Images were clear and sharp and I did not notice any lag or pixelation.

However, when connected to the set-top box, TV programmes were cast in a red tint and skin tones looked unnaturally pink.

It took nearly 25 seconds to boot up - an eternity if you are rushing to catch your favourite drama serial.

Final say

A bang-for-buck player despite a slow boot-up.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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