We just bought an RCA RTD217 home theater for our living room. It was kind of unexpected, but I thought I would blog about it because it was such a good deal. I’m no audiophile by any means, and I’m pretty geeky when it comes to computers and gadgets – and I do have a flat screen LCD hanging on the living room wall. But for some reason we just never got any kind of surround sound or home theater system. Probably because I spent the money on an external hard drive or something else.
So I’m in the store and we see they have some display models on clearance – and I took a look. They had 2 DVD players and one was HDMI output that was pretty cool. But then I saw this RCA surround sound system for half off the retail. It was 250 watts (50 per speaker), a 5 disc DVD changer, AM/FM radio, but the thing that sold me was the fact that it would play CD and DVD data disks, Windows Media, DivX, PhotoCD’s – just about anything. The selling feature was the fact that it had a USB port on the front that said it would accept both USB flash drives or external hard drives!
So at half off we couldn’t resist – we snatched it up and took it home. I hooked it up to the 5 prong component cable to our flat screen, wired up the speakers, and fired it up! It has 4 levels of subwoofer, both surround and stereo modes, DVD’s were awesome (progressive scan), and we sent audio from the TV back to it so the cable could play through it on the AUX channel.
Then we brought in the external hard drive, and that’s when the surprise came in. We plugged in a 300GB Western Digital Mybook and brought up the menu on the TV. MP3’s played fine, pictures were great, but we couldn’t get it to play any video at all. Not Windows Media, DivX, MPG, anything! Arghh! We went back and read the manual and found out that the USB port only plays AUDIO!! Crap! All is not lost because we can still play data discs, but that means burning one every time. I guess we just have to get some rewritables. I still say that at half off it was a good deal. Let this be a lesson to you if you go shopping for a home theater with a USB input jack!
I am however, going to start searching for a stereo system that you can hook up external drives too and play video!! I’ve heard you can “hack” the menus of some DVD players too (through the firmware) and this is something that we’re certainly going to look into.
[nms:rtd217,5,0,0,smorgas.rca.rtd217]
[nms:wd mybook,5,0,0,smorgas.wd.mybook]
