14 DAY TRIAL // Last time I heard about the Mvix Wireless HD Media Center was back in May. And I was almost on my way of forgetting about it when I found out that ThinkGeek is selling it now. I guess that in the end there was no actual launch of the product but they decided to release it into the market directly and see how well it will sell. And from what I've heard, it's already turning out into quite a success.
The Unicorn MVix AV HDD enclosure uses a 3.5 inch hard drive and connects to your network using 802.11b/g/pre-N MIMO standards. It also supports a several types of video and audio output connectors such as Composite, S-Video, Component, and DVI, all of them can be used to connect it to a large screen. The MVix supports High Definition and can even upsample SD movies to HD resolutions. You can view video with HD Component Y, Pb, Pr (480p, 720p, 1080i) or DVI (480, 720, 1080i, 1080p). No information about HDCP support is available.
The wireless enclosure integrates a lot of decoders and filters in order to play just about anything you need. Among them you have Mpeg-1/2/4, VOB, WMV 9, DivX, and Xvid integrated decoders for video playing. On the audio side it'll play also your MP3's, WMA's, AAC's, Ogg files, or even uncompressed WAV and 5.1 AC3 encoded content. And because the wireless output supports 802.11n it shouldn't have a problem streaming HD content with such a high bandwidth output. On the downside, the enclosure actually comes without the hard drive and still costs $299 at ThinkGeek. Quite an expensive 87mm(w) x 193mm(h) x 58mm(d) gadget to play with.