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Review of the Portable MPEG Player - MG25

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Playing digital media on the TV is becoming more and more common these days. There are a few PVR solutions that allow you to record/play digitally essentially brining the VCR to the 21st century. The MediaGate MG-25 is not a PVR; it fills a gap where people only want to play files and be mobile with it.

Imagine a USB 2.5 & harddrive caddy with Video/Audio output and you’ve got the MG-25. In a snapshot I’ve found this device very handy and a lot easier to use then a pc/laptop+tv combination!



It’s quite small (80×148x24mm) and light (160g without the Harddrive) as you’d expect from a 2.5& laptop haddrive caddy. What is exciting however are the playback features

- DivX, Xvid, Mpeg2, MP3, Mpeg4, JPG and other media formats playback
- Resolutions of 720×480p 1280×720p, and 1920×1080i (HDTV)
- 5.1 Audio Output
- Multi OS Capable (Windows, Mac, Linux)

You get all the cables you need to hook it up as well as a remote control (with batteries!). The 5.1 audio cable may be an issue for people that don’t have audio inputs for their system (3 - RCA leads) such as the Logitech Z-680 but no issue if you have a real audio setup.

I just had to crack it open and see what makes it tick.



What powers this beast is a Sigma Designs chip that hardware decodes the said formats. It’s also well known that Sigma ’stole’ GPL code from the Xvid project in the development of this chipset. As far as I know an agreement was made and Sigma acknowledged the code in their chipsets. Long live opensource!

As you can see the harddrive fits snugly on the board with 4 screws mounting it to the PCB. The screws are big enough for a standard ‘computer size’ screwdriver to screw in.

Plugging in the power left me a little shocked, as there was no activity from the unit. Usually with external caddies the harddrive starts wirring up immediately, but then I realised that this is a media consumer product, so I grabbed the remote and hit the power button and the little red light blinked on. icon_smile.gif

I have determined the MG25 has two modes of operation. Normal viewing where you have it plugged into a TV and use the remote control, and ‘PC Mode’ where you plug the USB cable into the machine. In the later mode the ‘TV’ section shuts down so you can access the harddrive on your computer. I suppose the USB controller is a seperate chip and it’s a lot simpler to have the media side shutdown.

Bottom line is you can’t have the MG25 plugged into a PC and watch it at the same time.

It’s not much of an issue as you can plug and unplug the device seemlessly without any issues.

When you plug in the MediaGate for the first time with an unformatted harddrive you have to format it. The device understands FAT32 and NTFS in my findings, your personal choice is up to you in what you want to format it. (FAT32 is a little more universally read so that’s what I chose so I can use it on my Linux machines as well as my Mac/Windows boxes).



It does however require more power then the USB cable supplies. I suspect this is not the device itself, but the harddrive power draw. The power apadter included is quite small and portable, though I’m on the hunt for a PS/2-&power adapter so you can draw power from PC’s keyboard port and don’t have to carry the power adapter everywhere.

Note that the USB power is sufficent for use on the PC alone. You can copy files with just the USB power but not run the device on the TV.

Handy if you just want to use it for a portable harddrive.


The menu’s fairly user friendly. The top tabs are seperated in three menu’s - Video, Audio, Photos. When you select one of these Tabs you can then browse through the folder tree structure using the arrow keys on the remote.



The only complaint I had was that to exit a Tab you have to press the ‘Media Change’ button on the remote. It would have made more sense with a more a ‘Back’ or a ‘Escape’ key. I guess I’m just spoilt with Apple design of late.



There’s also a few handy features watching digital movies, such as skipping to a specified time as the image shows. Fast forwarding and rewinding are fine with maximum speeds at 32x and works quite well

In all of my playback tests the Mediagate hasn’t skipped a beat even with highly compressed movies with lots of action playback is smooth. I’m highly impressed with the ease of playback and watching, even my non-techy nextdoor neighbours find using it simple.

Overall = 8.5/10

I would have given it a 9 if the inferface was a little nicer and a 10/10 if could record TV, but that’s a dream come true!

If you’re a person who has lots of media on your computer and want a no fuss way on playing on your TV, this is for you!

You can find out more about the MediaGate by visting their english website.

Written by JohnBlade

November 30th, 2004 at 2:43 pm

Posted in General

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