BNI Media Box

The Media Box, as the name suggests, isn't just another portable hard disk. Although it has 40Gb of space to be filled, it will also play most media files you put on the disk, on a television.

The BNI Media Box is small, thin and light compared to many of the portable drives around. Connect it to a suitable screen using the supplied cable (which has three phono connectors, one for video and two for sound) and you can use the remote control (also supplied) to navigate around your files.

It's compatible with most popular media files, including DivX, Video CD, WMV, WMA, MP3 and JPEG files. Sound quality is good, as is the quality when displaying still images. With video it's not quite as impressive, though. There is noticeable blockiness, although the videos are perfectly watchable.

The on-screen menu system is easy to use, and you don't even need to arrange your files into specific folders for the player to recognise them. Simply dump them on the disk and you can browse just like you would in Windows Explorer.

The quality of playback isn't as good as from the similar LaCie Silverscreen drive, but at a significantly lower price this looks like a good deal.