I managed to get a little bit of use out of the EG-M34A NMT device, and so far I am quite happy with it.

Because of the extensive DVD collection we have, it’s hard to actually find a movie when you want to watch it. Because I always backup every DVD (at least the ones I enjoy) to a harddrive, it’s easier to just find it on the computer than to spend a few hours digging through DVDs. Because my main portable device for video playback is an iPod Touch, all my movies are encoded in a format that plays on it. To watch these on TV, I used to transfer them to my iPod Nano (3G, which plays the iPod Touch formatted files perfectly), and use the iPod Video (5G) dock to connect it to the TV (never gotten around to get another dock, because you never know what they change in a future model). It works pretty good for watching movies, but I never managed to get a good understanding of the remote for the dock, so watching a few TV episodes is a bit of a pain.

With the NMT, I use an old 100GB laptop harddisk that came from my Dell laptop. I always use 7200rpm drives for computers I work on, so the 5400rpm drive was not doing anything.

The NMT has, strangely, an external sata port that uses internal cables. Hooking up the harddrive to the (included) cable makes it work great, and it even reads NTFS formatted drives (needed for large HD video files).

With this combination, I’ve managed to watch some Battlestar Galactica episodes in HD (720p) format on my 32″ Philips LCD TV, and it looks great. I had some issues with one file, but that was due to corruption in the file itself for some reason. Now all I need with it is a good sound system.

All in all, the EG-M34A is a great purchase for me.

(remember, if you do get one, update the firmware first. It takes a while though, to update, download the update from their website (don’t update through the device itself) and copy both the bin file and the html file to an empty pendrive)