The Rimax Alum TVIX Jukebox is designed to help you play back compressed audio or video through your TV or home entertainment system. It's a stylish looking device housing a built-in 3.5-inch hard drive available in a range of capacities from 80 to 320GB. You'll also find a memory card reader on the front that's compatible with most of today's card formats.

Like most multimedia players it's extremely easy to set up and use. Once plugged into your PC via the USB 2.0 connection it appears as a standard hard drive for you to drag and drop content across. There's no particular folder structure here for different file types; you simply dump everything onto the drive and it separates the files into categories when you plug it into the TV.

You'll find composite and component connections here, along with optical out and VGA out for data. You're also supplied with composite and component cables, so you should be ready to go straight out of the box.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

In terms of file compatibility the Rimax is very good, with support for DVD (.vob), MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, .AVI, .ASF, MP3, JPG, and VCD (.dat). Unfortunately, those looking to play back high definition content or video files encoded at high resolutions will be let down, as there's only support here up to 720 x 576. This is standard DVD quality and for most people might be perfectly acceptable, but with more and more content becoming available at higher resolutions it's certainly not one for the future.

The interface is basic. You're given a very limited set of options in terms of configuring the player, mostly based around regional settings. Four simple menu categories allow you to choose between video, music, photos or a file viewer. When you browse each category you'll find that thumbnails of each file appear on screen at four to a page.

You can't change the file view here, so if, for example, you have 20 or 30 videos on the device, it'll take you an age to scroll through the list page by page. Video playback isn't of the highest quality either, often appearing either very grainy or with colours washed out, and with the lack of any kind of picture adjustment there's not a lot you can do to fix it.

The music player is very basic. You'll find a rudimentary graphics equaliser but no functions to create playlists or make it easier to browse or control your music. Lastly the photo viewer, adopting the same simplistic approach, offers some slideshow capabilities but very few options for managing your pictures. It's really not the most versatile device in the world, then; you'll need your videos in the right resolutions at a level of quality that the Rimax finds most amenable to get the most from them.

It's one of the cheaper multimedia jukeboxes around, but after spending a few minutes with it you'll see why. There are better options available, such as the TVix Mini from KJGlobal, and while you'd pay a little more for this we'd say it's well worth the extra cost.

A low price and some nice little touches like the memory card reader give the Rimax some appeal, but ultimately a lack of control over your media and relatively poor resolution support means that despite the low cost, you're just not getting enough for your money.