the new rover T.V pvp

I was contemplating buying a video Ipod for christmas 2005, but held off. I really wanted a more "video-centric" product. In July 2006, I bought the 16:9 "big screen" formatted Rover TV and really like it for the form factor and picture quality even at angles.

Yes, the unit only has a 2GB SD card, but that's fine for recording the occaisional TV show, etc not for my entire video library. It would be nice to figure out how to plug a USB hard drive into this thing....

Anyways, the company has been good thus far with a couple of glitches...1) The headphone jack is wiggly and "scratchy", 2) my unit came with only the 2GB card (where both a 1GB and 2GB were promised to early buyers), and 3) the user documentation was awful. The company has promised to replace my unit and has fixed the documentation.

The menu navigation is intuitive if you're PC-literate, but I'd not want to sell this to a newbie.

ps: I do NOT believe there is a way to record via a "timer" function....But it is nice having DIRECT analog (VCR or DVD) recording directly into the Rover. The resulting MPEG-4 file ends up in a non-video directory (under "recorder") not with other videos, but the Rover has built-in file "move" functions.....

Well,
I've had my RoverTV for several weeks now, and can say that this indeed is a good personal media player and that it is really "video-centric" as opposed to even a video Ipod, which is "audio-centric".

The screen is big, bright; sound is good. I can record TV directly off the AV output jacks into Rover's built-in MP4 compressed files. My current firmware doesn't have the DVR timer functions yet, but it's been promised for a upgrade.

The RoverTV does need some sort of a case and easel stand. It makes for a great tray-table video player (my wife uses it during her chemotherapy sessions...uugh!) but it makes her days go by faster watching shows I've recorded. I also can download video files from my PC including MP4 and AVI files that I've recorded on my PC's All-in-Wonder TV tuner board.

I need to search around for more SD cards (now up to 4GB) as I'll put music on one, photos on another, and video shows on a 3rd....

Can you post a small video sample of the recording quality? I'm interested in using this as a video recorder but want to confirm the quality. If you have anything recorded at the highest setting (I believe this is MPEG-4, VGA, 30 fps), I would be very interested in seeing.

Did you purchase directly from Rover online? How long did it take to get it?

Red,
I recorded the same TV channel directly through the analog input jacks into the Rover TV and captured a few secords in their three different "recording" quality modes. The resulting files are all in ASF format.

When I play those files back on the Rover, all three qualities do suffer from modest pixelation, so it's not the same as playing a MPEG-2 file.

So, the high quality file (about 34 secs) is 8.9MB
the medium quality file (35 secs) is 4.9MB
and the low-quality recording (32 secs) is 2.4MB

I did order my unit from them online in July. It did show up in a couple of weeks, but I now understand that the company is swamped. It's tough to get an e-mail response, but try the phone. They owe me a firmware upgrade to allow for the built-in "timer" recording function. Instead, I record TV shows with my PC running at the ATI All-in-Wonder board.

Thanks! Sounds like the exact comparison I'm looking for. Unless I'm missing something, I couldn't find the actual link for the files. Did you post somewhere? Mabye YouTube would be a good place? Thanks!
Red_Z

I also bought the RoverTV, and I really like it. I am able to set the built in timer and record directly to the device. The only draw back to this is that the television/tuner has to be on the station I want to record. I also found a company in China that produces them and purchased one directly from them for quite a bit less. So, I now have two and haven't decided what to do with the second one or if I should start importing them myself. I do have the instructions saved as a word file if someone needs it.

In case you are interested:

http://reviews.cnet.com/DogHouse_Electronics_RoverTV_Wide_Screen/4505-6499_7-32068850.html