Pioneer AVH-P4100DVD 7-Inch Multimedia AV Receiver Review
November 9th, 2009
Pioneer AVH-P4100DVD 7-Inch In-Dash Double-DIN DVD Multimedia AV Receiver Review from Farmer Pete. Close to Perfect, But Tragic Flaws, I bought this unit because my XM radio subscription was ending, and I decided I wanted to buy a new radio that allowed me to play MP3s easily. I have a double DIN opening, and I was sick and tired of only seeing a 1 line 8 character display. The USB port flexibility, big screen, and cool features of this unit made me happy. I don’t like using iPods or any other device for that mater, so having the USB port was the big seller for me. I got it installed and I quickly hooked up a small flash drive with a few MP3’s. It was awesome how well it worked. I loved that I could scroll through the song with my finger. I listen to a lot of “podcasts” that are 60 minute long episodes, so being able to scan through at will is nice.
Then the bad started…I pulled out my 16 gig flash drive and copied over my MP3 collection (~10 gigs). I was so excited when I plugged it in to the usb port. Finally, I could take all of my music with me wherever I go! No cd’s!!! Awesome. Then I turned my car on and was prompted with “loading”…”Loading”….”Loading” about a minute or so later it finally came up and started playing my music. Okay, so maybe it only does it the first time I hook up the usb flash drive right? Nope. Infact, if you switch from the USB to the radio and back, it waits again. It wouldn’t be so bad if it at least played ANY song, but I have to sit there for a minute of silence as it loads all of the music. Most of my driving is 15 minutes or less, so wasting 10% of my time listening to silence is a real downer.
I’ve tried finding a way to make the device work better with USB drives, and the only recommendation I have is that if you use 4 gigs or less, it seems to be better. With 4 gigs I was waiting around 12 seconds or so. That’s still annoying, but at least it’s playing by the time I pull out of my driveway. So, I decided the only logical choice was to do what I swore I would NEVER EVER do. I bought an iPod. Looking in the manual, I saw that the iPod has features not available in the normal MP3 player. For example you can easily search by artist name/album/song name. The USB flash drive software only lets you search through your folder structure. That works most of the time, but it would be nice to automate it a bit more. The iPod also has a “Link Play” where you can have it queue up all songs by that “Artist”, “Album”, or “Genre”. Very nice. Now the bad part of the iPod…Well, there is the fact that I HAD TO BUY A !#@$* IPOD!!!! I had to spend $250 to get a feature that was supposed to be included with the radio (I guess I would have had to spend $50 for a 32gb flash drive). Second, the iPod disables the song position scrolling. You can fast forward, you can skip through the file if it has tracks (Luckily my podcasts DO have tracks, so this isn’t to bad), but you can’t put your finger on the location bar and have it skip to where you pointed to. Losing that feature was very sad. The other annoying thing is that since everything is database driven and not file driven, while it’s easy to queue up the album of the song you are listening to, often I find myself wanting to just play “1″ song by the same artist I am listening to. With the USB you could just hit the list button, select the song from the folder you are in, and then it would play away. With the iPod I have to load the album, flip through it randomly to get the song I want. It’s a little frustrating. I would also love to be able to set, view or use ratings of songs, but the software doesn’t support it. Probably just a compatibility issue. On the plus side, the iPod cable they tell you that you MUST have, well you don’t need it. As long as you only want to play music, you can use the regular sync cables for your iPod. Video will require the extra cable.
My only other complaint about the unit is it’s file format support. While the unit does support MP3, WAV, and AAC format, it doesn’t support any Loss Less codecs (WAV doesn’t count). FLAC support would be awesome. To get Lossless support, you have to use the iPod with Apple Lossless. No FLAC. I can’t complain to much about this though, as I knew this when I purchased it.
Overall this is a good unit. The flaws aren’t that bad if you are planning on using an iPod, but if you’re like me and wanted to simulate having a in-dash hard disk by using flash drives, you’ll be pissed with this. Hopefully there will be a firmware update, but until that time I can’t recommend anyone use a USB flash drive over 4GB in size. (FYI, using a DVD with mp3’s on it results in the same loading time issues).
On a side note, I did bypass the video cutoff. It’s parking brake wire just needs to connect to ground. The trick to it though is that it needs a pulse on the ground line. So you can’t just connect the wire to ground permanently. Some people rigged switches that they manually press to get it to work. I rigged up a relay that is triggered by the head unit’s amp turn-on line that makes the ground connection. I now have a unit that fully automatically lets me view video at any time. Don’t be an idiot and try to watch a video while driving though, I did it for the benefit of passengers.
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Posted in Car DVD Players | 
Tags: 15 Minutes, Downer, Finding A Way, Flexibility, Gig, Gigs, Inch Multimedia, Ipods, Line 8, Minute Of Silence, Mp3 Collection, Multimedia, New Radio, Pioneer Avh, Playing My Music, Podcasts, Tragic Flaws, Usb Drives, Usb Flash Drive, Usb Port, Xm Radio
