Media player evolution in LG mode

It is no accident that we wrote an evolution in the title, as the announcements at LG are on a well-tracked curve. Let's see what has happened to them in the last year and a half! Let's start with the fact that there was and is DivX (XviD), and desktop players that have been around for years. We know that material coming in DivX format is not characterized by appallingly high resolution, in exchange for acceptable picture quality on a traditional television, and importantly, we get relatively little storage space. However, time is running out, we have entered the era of HD Ready and then HD displays. As we have described several times, these are 720- and 1080 lines horizontally, which also means that if you want to watch a movie of this quality - and why not - it means that the storage demand will be higher with more compression, and more powerful. hardware required for playback.

LG HXF2 packed

DivX was developed and got all sorts of extra features to handle subtitle files, for example. WMV HD has also been released, which is a child of Microsoft - not bad anyway - but for some inexplicable or not so inexplicable reason, it wasn't the old warrior or the software giant that came into play, but a third format, and that is the MKV.

Surely many people know that MKV is actually a package in which we can find various subtitle files, audio tracks, and most importantly video, which although they are usually in H.264 they do not have to be in it. You can also pack something else in the package, such as DivX HD. Perhaps it is precisely this flexibility that has led to the success of MKV.

The previous stage in LG’s evolution, the MS450H desktop player

However, there was a big problem with it, that it could only be played on a computer. Thus, anyone who wanted to watch material in this format either exposed a machine next to the TV - or carried the TV next to the machine - or interwoven the apartment with cables. This state lasted for a year or two, and we didn’t really understand why there was no desktop player that could handle and play the materials packaged in MKV.

Then the ice broke and information about various players started dripping on the net, and soon we received a structure from LG that, in addition to being able to play MKV files, included a Blu-ray reader. It should be noted that LG was a pioneer in supporting the format, although it is also true that it was obvious that there is not a very different direction to go.

So and so came the first player that knew MKV and knew Blu-ray. Then last year came another native of evolution, which became a hard drive player. This left out the optical drive, which is a good indication that LG has also realized that until the mass spread of Blu-ray - will it be like this at all? - peoples do not store their files on optical disks, but on increasingly cheap hard disks. Then why the optical reader? Of course, for a product like this to be successful, it is not enough to have a hard drive in it, you know MKV, you need more extras. In this case, it was the installation of a digital tuner, or more precisely two, with which to receive MPEG4 terrestrial broadcasts. We’re not telling a secret by the time the digital switchover is approaching, and then fired at traditional tuners who won’t have an MPEG4 tuner, they take the broadcasts from either satellites or cable, but from the air, as they certainly haven’t.

After the tuner player, we arrived at another stage in the evolution of the LG MKV media player, represented by the HXF2 portable player. This device is what we are trying to present to our readers in this article, so scroll quickly to see what it is all about!