Mediagate MG-25

As I wrote earlier, I've had the AL Tech MediaGate MG-25 for about two months, and have run it through its paces. Here's my review.

The MG-25 is a tiny, tiny 2.5-inch hard-drive enclosure that can play MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and DivX videos. It includes a remote control that's not ergonomic like the Tivo peanut remote, but it is well laid out and easy enough to memorize in the darkness of the living room. It includes several cables that adapt its minijacks to RCA plug outputs, as well as a USB cable and power adapter.

As a USB drive, the MG-25 is completely unremarkable. Plug it in to your computer's USB 2.0 port, and drag a few movies onto it.

As a video player, however, it's pretty good. The onscreen UI is reasonably attractive and easy enough to use for anyone who can navigate in Windows Explorer or the Macintosh Finder. Select a movie and it begins playing. It has up to 32x fast-forward, which isn't quite fast enough to get back to the middle of a movie without frustration, but it does remember where you left off when you stop viewing a movie, so in many cases you can recover from an accidental button press on the remote.

My favorite feature has turned out to be the ability of the device to play DVD ISOs. I can copy a DVD onto the device using a ripping program, then navigate the DVD menus from the MG-25. Playback quality is fine -- better, in fact, than my Philips DVP642 (which, admittedly, has notoriously bad video playback quality).

I did have trouble playing back one episode of Battlestar Galactica that turned out to have been mistakenly encoded with qpel. Otherwise, the device has been entirely stable.

The device has a slideshow feature. During playback of JPEGs, it seems to choose a random MP3 that it finds on the device and plays it, whether you like it or not. It also had trouble scaling 6-megapixel pictures from a Nikon D70; edges were jagged. Lower-resolution images looked fine.

The MG-25 is not as user-friendly as a Tivo. But it works well, and performs as advertised. I am happy with the purchase.