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This is a reference post really… somewhere to stick all the links to things which might help folks who have bought the infamous (or not…) EN-306TV-E.

This box is essentially a USB hard drive enclosure with a ‘media player wrapped around it’. It is a China produced piece of kit which has been OEM‘d all over the world and is based on the ESS 6425 chip. Manufactured by Shenzhen Zhuningweiye Digital Technolgy Co.,Ltd, apparently. In Australia it’s generally branded as ‘Vibe’.

It is not a EN-306TV-S which is based on a different video processing chip, with different capabilities, and has completely different back panel inputs and outputs (and it, the EN-306TV-S, has current third party firmware support along with a range of other players based on that chip).

Back to the EN-306TV-E…
Now as a USB hard drive its fine - and that’s the basis on which I bought it via EBay, happy to pay what I did for a 400GB USB hard-drive. Thankfully I had already stumbled upon a link to a series of forum posts which said that I shouldn’t expect too much from it as a media player.

And para-phasing - my experience has been similar to others - hardware and USB functionality is fine, the firmware and media player side of the thing is, however, ‘tragic’. Technically two main points are raised:

• The format of the harddrive. My experience says with firmware >3.25.xxxx formatting with FAT32 or NTFS makes little difference. I have reformatted mine back to NTFS. (press the ‘Info’ button the remote to see your current firmware version)
• The devices firmware. Mine shipped with 3.25.xxxx. The only available upgrade I have been able to find is a South American ftp site, and to confirm we are looking at firmware for the right device the matching product page is here. The firmware version is 3.28.3121beta and my unit upgraded without problem.

Neither of these have made any difference to the device for me. The key seems to be making sure that video files are ‘correct’ to keep the player happy. That’s probably the positive side of this story - I’ve found some outstanding pieces of software for video processing which have helped the situation a lot. I’ll leave them to another post. But the’ bottom line’ is if you want a device that ‘just works’, and you’re not a technical fiddler, then this device is not for you.

Thanks to those on the internet who have posted on the topic and shared thier experiences. My main reference points for the information in this post come from the Aussie Forums thread which seem to be mirrored on this eyo forums thread.