Normus MovieCube HDD Media Player

Hard disk based media players are definitely catching on, we have already seen about 3 of them these past few months. They come like little bundles of geeky joy, what with cool features like networking capabilities, vast storage spaces etc. You can rely on us for one thing; we look for new brands thoroughly, and never are biased towards biggie names. Today we have a HDD based Media center/player by a brand called Normus, relatively unheard of here. They have 2 models, one full HD capable unit called the NXI-9000.  The other HD ready model is NTS -7500. We have the latter; it comes packed with connectors and features, so let’s see how much fun we can have with this little rectangular box…

Design
The design of the Normus is pretty straight up, it resembles any normal external high capacity HDD. It stands vertically up and has a bare front face with a just a flush mounted power on switch. It lights up blue when on, and stays red in standby. The finish of the external chassis itself is a brushed black colored metallic one, while the front panel is piano gloss finished. The back panel is laden with connectors, many different kinds of them. Back to the front, The Normus Logo is imprinted on the top edge, in a conspicuous white font. Overall the unit looks very god, as it has a subtle and totally non tacky feel.

The connectors at the back are as follows: A single HDMI ( v1.1)out, A CAT5 LAN port, 2 regular USB slots for using the unit as a USB host, another USB B style slot for connecting to MP3, MP4 players. Then we have one set of component video output to connect to TVs, both composite out and in, and last but not least, there is Digital audio out in form of one coaxial and one optical. Thus connections wise we have plenty options.

What it does
This media center has quite a few of the essential requirements for full fledged AV entertainment. There is the basic function of watching stored movies off the HDD, which can be upto 1 TB. The HDD connects via regular SATA, and is not included on purchase. The file formats playable are: For audio there is MP3, MP2, Wav, Ogg vorbis and WMA. There is no support for lossless codec like Flac, Monkey audio etc. In video we have  MPEG1( VCDs etc.) MPEG2 and MPEG 4 ASP( DivX Xvid etc). It does not mention anywhere MPEG 4 Part 10, thus h.264 is not in this model, nor is Matroska. These are in the higher end Full HD model though. It also reads JPEGs and does slide shows etc.

It supports ethernet connections, and there is WIFI support though the reciever is again not inbuilt in the model, There is a separate Wi-Fi (802.11g) USB adapter available. With this, one can use the Movie Cube as a central player and stream content from other devices. Besides networking one can also connect external HDDs, flash drives and play off them. Another use of the networking abilities is to play Internet radio— the unit can automatically browse and select various radio stations, it has stored in it’s database

Another cute feature which was not there in other models we checked was recordability. It is not a tuner, it basically needs a signal through your set top box. So if you have a regular non Tata sky plus style set top box, you can route the signal in through the composite AV in, and record the show, cricket match or whatever on to the internal HDD. It’s not only confined to TV recordings, basically anything you plug in via its video in, it can record.