Mustek PVR H-140 (40 GB) Digital Media Player

I had been thinking about buying the Mustek for a couple of months but there were no independant reviews a couple of months ago, here is my opinion for what it is worth.

I originally started looking for an MP3 player and decided that 1 Gig wasn't quite enough. Then I started looking at the hard drive players and saw the iRiver. It can show you jpeg files on screen. Looking for a compact flash slot for the camera I was planning on buying led me to the Archos. I couldn't make up my mind between the two and one day when searching for the iRiver I stumbled across the Mustek. It seemed to do everything the others did but it had a 40 Gb drive and could play/record video as well. Eventually I bought the Mustek and a new camera. ( I use an SD-CF1 to adapt the SD card I already had to fit into the compact flash slot of the camera. To transfer files over I take the SD card out of the adapter and put it in the Mustek. I have had no difficulty taking JPEGs over at all and there is no quality loss. The file browser for the Mustek is basic though and the browser will only show up file types that it will recognise. I had hoped to transfer RAW files from the camera but havent found a way of doing it yet. I am planning on trying taking some RAW photos and then copying the whole folder from the card to the Mustek and seeing if it will copy all the contents of the folder or just the files it recognises.

Music : I have put my entire CD collection on it and that has taken up 7 gigs. The headphones supplied are not up to much but with good headphones or linking the headphone socket to line in on a hi-fi the sound quality is as good as my pc will make from 196 kbps files. The screen can take about 8 lines of text at 25 characters per line by guesswork but as the Mustek doesn't use them all I cant tell exactly. This is annoying when trying to browse to a particular track as I have my CDs on the hard drive of my PC filed under band name then album name then track number then track name. Usually I can only see the band name so it was guesswork for a while. I spent an hour renaming the folders and files abbreviating band names to 2 letters , this lets you see the albums name, I also renamed the files to start with just the track number at the start which means that when you go into an album's folder you can see the beginning of the track name.

Video : I have put a few film clips on and these are pretty good quality. Watching them on the screen at arms length it is very impressive. The conversion software is slow and some of the films I have put over are jerky. I think you can just drag and drop asf files to play on the mustek but havent tried this. There are plenty of programmes out there that will convert other film formats into asf for you.

Photo : I have also stuck on thousands ( 5 thousand or so ) jpegs mostly taken with my old camera. It is possible to browse these at normal size or to zoom in x2 and x4. My new camera images do not zoom at all possibly because they are too large ( averaging 3-4 Mb each ) but they show up fine on the screen unzoomed.

Overall there are a lot of good things to this machine. Other features are there that I havent mentioned as I havent used them much. Sound recording - there is a microphone built in so you can use this to record your voice without a microphone. Personal organiser – it can link up with a number of PC based calendar programmes and then will sound an alarm or play a file at the time of the appt. Games – Not up to much here but I wasn't expecting anything at all.

I havent tried using it as a video recorder although I guess really that is what this machine is intended for it being called a PVR ( personal video recorder ) , it can supposedly record video straight into asf format from any composite source ( red white and yellow lead connectors which can be connected to scart sockets via a third party connector. I have used it in reverse though to play video from the device into a TV and the quality is pretty good, definitely watchable.

I would echo the previous reviewer's comment that I hope that there is a firmware update that will improve the file browser to copy all files on the sd card. ( It is possible to copy any file to the Mustek from a PC ).

A final grumble would be the video player function, I havent found a way that the progress bar can be dragged to halfway through the film. If you only want to watch part of the film you have to fast forward and wait until it gets where you want to. – and to get half way through an hour of programme could take 5-7 mins I guess.


It isnt perfect but overall I feel it is excellent value for money. I bought mine for #200 and am very happy with it and have no reservations about recommending it to anyone that that is interested in it. I can take my entire music and photo collections with me as well as have room to put on videos for long journeys.