Building up your music and movie collection on your portable hard-drive to view files on your computer is all good and well, but what if you want to share the movies or a photo album with your friends and family by displaying it on the big screen TV? 

 

This is where the Media Player MP8809 from Premiumsun comes in, as it allows you to play movies, view photos and watch movies, which are stored on your USB flash drive, memory card or portable hard-drive. You can watch these on your TV or PC monitor, without the need to employ a PC.

 

 

This compact (24 x 143 x 96 mm) Media Player is easy to set up and operate thanks to its straightforward and simple user interface, which features big icons for pictures, video and text files (such as Adobe PDF files). A remote controller is included in the box as well. 

 

 

Unlike the Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD this device doesn’t offer its own on-board storage, but it is compatible with a variety of storage connection types including SD cards, MMC cards, Memory Stick Duo cards and USB 2.0 devices such as a portable HDD or USB flash drive.

 

It supports a plethora of video file types including Mpeg 1/2/4, VCD, DVD, DIVX 3/4/5, XVID, VOB and AVI, whilst also supporting both JPEG and BMP for images. Audio file types are also well catered for with the incorporation of support for amongst others MP3, AAC and WMA files.

 

HD content playback isn’t offered by the MP8809, as it only offers video playback at a lower resolution of 480i/p and 576i/p. So even if you have XVID files (which the player supports) that are HD Blu-ray rips, they will not play. Another of Starsun’s products, the MP8809H sports HD ready 720p playback and comes with an HDMI out, as does the Iomega ScreenPlay TV Link Director which we also reviewed.

 

 

The MP8809 Media Player is compact, easy to use and provides playback for most popular file types. Although it doesn’t offer HD playback or its own on-board storage, it’s really easy to integrate with your existing portable tech gear such as flash drives and portable HDD.  

 

Premiumsun might not be the world’s best known brand, but at an affordable R604 from Timeline Computer on 011-791-2468, the device should definitely have its audience.