Lite-On LVW-5045 Review – Standalone HDD+DVD Recorder

Like a regular DVD player, it is possible to pop in an Audio or Video CD or DVD and start playing it.  However, for playing data discs (such as those containing MP3’s) and playback back content off its internal HDD, the Recorder has a built in browser to access content on these discs.  The browser will only show suitable content, which includes MPEG 1 & 2 video for the video tab, WAV, WMA & MP3 music for the music tab and JPG & BMP pictures for the picture tab.

The browser can be brought up by pressing the ‘Browser’ key on the remote.  By default, the browser will show the content based from the source that the Recorder is currently set to.  However, to switch between HDD and DVD, the very right tab gives this choice.  A shortcut is to simply press the ‘HDD/DVD’ button on the remote.

Video Browser

When the browser is brought up, the first view it shows is the Video tab as shown in the following screenshot:

For each recording, the title, time & date of recording, duration and recording quality are shown below each thumbnail.  Navigating between pages is fairly straight forward by highlighting a page number at the bottom (001, 002, etc.) and pressing ‘Enter’ to select it or selecting the navigation arrows on the bottom left & right.  Playing a recording is as simple as highlighting it and pressing play or ‘Enter’.

Any screen showing thumbnails can also be shown as a Text View such as in the following screen.  However, while only six titles per screen are still only shown for the text view mode, it does have the advantage of showing the full title of each video, especially if the user is interested in looking for a title by name instead of by thumbnail:

Unfortunately, the video browser is not of much use when it comes to (Super) Video CDs or most DVDs that were not recorded by this Recorder.  With these discs, the browser only gives one option and that is to play the disc:

The text view does not give any more options or information.  If the text view mode is shown, it will only show ‘DVD Video’ also, but without the thumbnail.

Music Browser

For the Music and Picture tabs, the browser shows the contents in a folder layout.  Whether browsing a disc or its HDD, the root level contains folders as shown in the following screen shot (for the Music tab).  Each folder contains one or more tracks.  For data discs containing folders within folders, the browser shows as if all the folders were present on the root level.  Music or pictures stored on the top level of a disc are shown in the folder ‘Default’.

Like with the Video tab, it is also possible to show the contents as a text view.  Using the text view is more useful in this tab as the Recorder only gives a choice of five icons when creating a folder.  The following screen shows the Music folders in text view:

Once a folder is highlighted, the contents can be played by pressing ‘Play’ or can be browsed by pressing ‘Enter’.  For example, the following screen shows the contents of the ‘Default’ folder:

Note that when browsing inside a music folder, there is no thumbnail mode. 

If a music CD is loaded and the Recorder’s mode is set to ‘DVD’, the Music tab will show one folder with the number of tracks and CD duration shown below the folder:

The Text View basically shows the same info on a single line without the icon, although it is not clear what the purpose of this is for in this case.  When the Audio CD folder is opened, the following screen appears which basically shows the track numbers and their duration:

Picture Browser

Like the Music tab, the Picture tab shows the entire disc’s or HDD’s folders grouped together, with only pictures shown within each folder.  While this may be handy by not having to navigate more than one folder deep, it can pose a problem, especially if two or more folders have the same name and also folders are not put in alphabetical order.  For example, there could be a folder called ‘People’ within a higher folder called ‘Paris’ and another folder also called ‘People’ within a higher folder called ‘Chicago’, however when the Recorder shows the folders grouped together, it will show two ‘People’ folders, however it is not clear which is associated with Paris or Chicago without checking the contents.

The following screenshot shows the picture tab at the folder level:

Unlike the Music tab, the user can set any image as the folder image.  By default, it will set the first image within the folder as the folder thumbnail image.  Like the Music tab, folders can be shown as a text layout also to see the full folder titles:

A folder (album) can be shown as a slide show by simply selecting the folder and pressing play.  The time per slide can be adjusted via the main Setup menu, within the section ‘Playback’ and option ‘Slide Time’.

Individual photos can be browsed by navigating to the folder to view and pressing ‘Enter’.  This brings up thumbnails of the images with a file name, date and size shown below each thumbnail.  Unlike the Video tab or folder selection levels, it is not possible to show images as a text-only view.

A picture can be shown by highlighting it and pressing ‘Enter’ or play.  The Recorder will start from this picture and then show the remainder as a slide show.  To keep the shown picture continuously, press the pause button.

While playback content, whether music, video or pictures, the Recorder has some useful features to control playback or show extra information.  For example, the Recorder can easily jump to a given section within a track in which it would take a while even with 16x fast-forwarding.  As each type of content has its own type of navigation, this section broken down into three sub-sections to cover Video, Music and Pictures.  Most of the playback features are available from the navigation menu by pressing the ‘Navi.’ button. 

Video Control

While playing video content, the number of playback features within the navigation menu depends on whether the video is being played from DVD or a video file.  Some playback features may be hidden if they are not available, for example the ‘Subtitle’ menu is hidden if no subtitles are present.

The following screen shows an example of the Navigation Menu while a music video DVD is playing:

The Navigation Menu consists of the following:

• Repeat
• Zoom
• Slow Motion
  • é  1/2X
  • é  1/4X
  • éŸ 1/2X
  • éŸ 1/4X
• Search
  • Title/Chapter
  • Time (Hidden for Video DVDs)
• A-B Repeat
  • Set Point A
  • Set Point B
  • Cancel
• Subtitle (If present)
  • Off
  • Choice of 1 to number of subtitles available.
• Audio (If more than one sound track)
  • Varies depending on disc, e.g. LCPM, DTS and DD
• Angle (If present)
  • Varies depending on disc
• Information
  • Choice of On or Off
• Exit

The majority of the navigation features such as Repeat, Slow Motion, A-B Repeat, Subtitle, Audio track selection and Angle selection functions the same as with most other DVD players. 

The zoom feature is useful to zoom in on a particular section of the picture and can zoom in levels of 1X, 2X, 3X and 4X.  While there are navigation controls to navigate through the image while zoomed in, it will only move in three fixed points vertical (top, middle and bottom) as well as three points horizontal (left, middle and right).  The following image shows the zoom control panel:

One feature that some DVD players lack is the ability to jump directly to a specific title and chapter.  This is available on this Recorder within the ‘Search’ option on the Navigation menu.  Unfortunately, the time option is only available when playing video from its internal HDD or from a data disc.  The time navigation makes it simple to jump to a specific point within a recording without being restricted to the fast-forward’s 16X maximum speed.

The ‘Information’ option gives a few details about the current recording being played such as shown in the following screenshot:

Unfortunately, there is no information about the audio or video bit rate as some DVD players will show this information also.

Audio Control

As there is no picture shown while playing music, the navigation menu is a much cut-down version of that shown while playing Video content.  The following screenshot shows an example of the navigation menu while playing a regular audio CD:

The Navigation Menu consists of the following:

• Repeat
  • Switches between ‘Repeat One’, ‘Repeat All’, ‘Shuffle Mode’ and play.
• Search
  • Track
  • Time
• A-B Repeat
  • Set Point A
  • Set Point B
  • Cancel
• Information
  • On
  • Off
• Exit

The Repeat and A-B Repeat options are like that of most other CD players.  The search option allows the user to directly hop to a given track or time period within the track. 

The information option shows a few more details besides the current track & time.  For Audio CDs, the following information is shown:

For MP3’s, the information also includes the name of the track and location as shown in the following screenshot:

Picture Control

The image navigation menu is a very cut down navigation menu also since there are very few navigation features with images to start with.  The following screenshot shows an example of the navigation menu available while showing pictures:

The Navigation Menu consists of the following:

• Repeat
  • Switches between ‘Repeat All’, ‘Shuffle Mode’ and play.
• File Search
• Picture Control
• Information
  • On
  • Off
• Exit

As the photos are shown as a slide show, the repeat feature can be useful to have the pictures repeating in a loop or shuffled.  The file search option allows the user to jump directly to a given file number, however as it is not clear which picture represents which file number, this option is really not that useful besides to skip down a bunch of pictures in a folder containing a lot of photos. 

The picture control option allows the user to zoom into the picture as well as navigate about the picture while zoomed in.  One drawback we find with navigation is that as the Recorder takes about 5 seconds to update the screen each time the picture is navigated up, down, left or right, it can be very tedious to navigate about a large image.  For example, when we zoom into the above 6 megapixel image to the pixel level, it takes about 30 seconds to navigate from the far left to the far right of the image.  Each navigation button moves the picture on screen by roughly half a screen over.  The following screenshot shows an example of the picture navigation control with the above image zoomed in to the pixel level:

The information option just shows a few details such as the folder name the picture is located within along with the filename and file number as shown in the following screenshot: