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Lightning Review: Iomega ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive
Posted by Benny Goldman at 9:30 AM on June 17, 2008
The Gadget: The Iomega ScreenPlay HD upscaling multimedia drive, a 500GB HDD for playing movies, music, and slideshows on your TV set.
The Price: US$200
The Verdict: This thing kinda sucks. I was hoping the ScreenPlay would be able to replace my current set up of streaming media over an Xbox 360. The 360 works most of the time, but sometimes it gets hung up buffering large files, and I don't have an external HDD the size of the ScreenPlay to plug into it. If this one could play all the codecs of the Xbox while looking halfway decent and not lagging, I'd convert in a heartbeat.
The first problem came when I tried to load files from my Mac. The drive is formatted in NTFS, rendering it incompatible with OS X. Worried I'd lose the ScreenPlay's UI if I formatted the drive, I got some files from my roommate's PC first. (Later, I formatted the drive to FAT, and everything loaded fine from both computers.) The AVIs transferred quickly, and I hooked it up to the TV via HDMI.
The UI is just a basic file manager, nothing special or sexy about it. One thing I found particularly annoying is that the button in the centre of the D-Pad is "Play" and not "OK", so pressing play on a folder went straight to the first file. It took me about five times of hitting it to figure it out. However, I did like that the ScreenPlay accepted multiple levels of folders, something I haven't been able to figure out for my Mac files on the Xbox.
Picture quality on the ScreenPlay wasn't very good. It claims to upscale content, but my low-qual Flight of the Conchords videos looked like junk, and higher-res BSG episodes looked the same as they do on Xbox. When I tried to play a 720p ep of Planet Earth, I got a "resolution not supported" error—this never happens on Xbox. The MP4 videos that I use to encode all my Handbrake rips didn't show up in the menu, since they are not supported. Music and photo playback were decent, but the interface wasn't nearly as robust as the Xbox.
The ScreenPlay HD didn't meet my expectations at all. Sure, it can play some videos and other multimedia, and it's nice to not worry about buffering, but the playback limitations outweigh the benefits. On top of that, US$200 is steep for a 500GB HD, especially considering Iomega sells others for under US$100. There's no chance that this would replace my Xbox for watching computer media on TV, but it could make a nice, if expensive, addition to plug into the 360's USB port. [Iomega]
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
robotleawesome
Posted 10:21 AM 17/6/08
OH, duh - the Neuros rocks.
robotleawesome
Rory1
Posted 10:20 AM 17/6/08
Check this out, I just picked one up. Still got a few bugs here & there. But seems to play 720p & 1080p great.
*Support H.264, X.264, MKV formats
*HDMI port for true HD at 1080p resolution
*2"LCD Screen
*Network Stream Playback
*E‐SATA Port
*NDAS solution for Network storage
[www.hantech.ca]
Rory1
stavs
Posted 10:00 AM 17/6/08
@robotleawesome:
Get a Popcorn Hour-thing rocks. [www.popcornhour.com]
It will play anything you throw at it.
stavs
rosalindavenue
Posted 9:59 AM 17/6/08
In 1999 I bought a dell Pentium 2 (I think) with a 9 gig hard drive. It had a zip drive in it. I never even put the free sample zip disk into the drive in the 7 years until I recycled it.... the CD writer I put in in 2000 made the thing irrelevant.
rosalindavenue
robotleawesome
Posted 9:56 AM 17/6/08
@Darkenigma75: throw them away.
robotleawesome
Darkenigma75
Posted 9:55 AM 17/6/08
Nope. Nothing I can think of. You know they still try and sell those things? I still think I have a couple of 100mb discs still floating around somewhere too, lol. They don't even make good coasters now. Now that would be a good lifehacker article. What to do with all those old Iomega zip discs you have laying around.
Darkenigma75
Buford T. Justice
Posted 9:54 AM 17/6/08
Iomega still exists????? Wow.
Buford T. Justice
robotleawesome
Posted 9:52 AM 17/6/08
Uh, so what should I get instead? I'm also looking to free my 360, it'd save a bit on my electric bill most likely.
robotleawesome
Parapraxis
Posted 9:44 AM 17/6/08
what has iomega put out in the past ten years that would be worth buying anymore?
The Zip drive? Anything else?
Parapraxis
HJTravels
Posted 12:25 PM 17/6/08
I use an Istar HD mediatank. It does a great job and cost $200 but doesn't have a hard drive. I put all my dvd's on drives and plug them into my player. It does a great job, especially if you want to just curl up on the sofa and just watch a movie or something.
HJTravels
supesguy
Posted 3:38 PM 17/6/08
"33" is a really good episode of Battlestar Galactica.
supesguy
zeusalmighty
Posted 6:15 PM 17/6/08
Shouldn't this article be called something like "Iomega ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive vS XBOX"? I know that you need to compare it to the xbox since you have one, but realistically speaking, not everyone owns an xbox, nor does everyone want to. How about comparing it to another media player solution?
zeusalmighty
ltcmurray
Posted 9:50 PM 17/6/08
Lightning review does not equal making me click More>>
ltcmurray
stupidjerk
Posted 10:50 PM 17/6/08
so the biggest problem with this drive is that you were using an Apple computer...right?
just wanted to get that straight.
stupidjerk
cebweb
Posted 3:26 AM 18/6/08
I bought one earlier this month (150$ at costco) and love it! Sure its not the second coming of digital media but it does what I want.
Boo-hoo the UI is just a basic file manager; GOOD it will get the job done with no fuss no muss. I for one don't want to wait for thumbnails to generate and have to guess what episode is going to play. It will load a new file in under 15 seconds with a simple indexing... screen then after that you are able to fast-forward / rewind like with any DVD no buffering at all. I personally like the compact package it makes it easy to watch a movie where ever you want. Hell last week I took it over to my friend's house, try to do that while streaming from your Xbox. Now I do not have a HD TV so I can't tell you how well it up scales and I also have no clue how it handles music that's what my Zen is for (ITS NOT A DAMN iPOD). But for playback of TV and ripped movies it works just fine.
Now this hdd is not without faults: As mentioned its annoying that it auto plays when opening a folder this is due to a design flaw in the remote. A simple bypass is to hit the stop button which shouldn't have taken 5 minutes to figure out. The Remote is also a simple generic plastic bubble POS remote with no indication on where a home key is located just row after row of the same button. I have also gotten the "Rez not supported error" on a 720p file but a quick look at the specs explains why • PAL/NTSC - 480i/480p; scalable to 720p/1080i . The biggest drawback I have is moving it back to my computer to put more media on it. But then again I got what I paid for, if I wanted to plop down the money I would have gotten the Mvix 780HD for 300$ which doesn't include the HDD.
Bottom line I think your review was skewed by you having to format the HD to work with your limited system, um I mean MAC.
cebweb
Enochrewt
Posted 3:17 AM 18/6/08
Wow, if this thing doesn't even support the 360's limited codec set, it's not worth a hill of beans.
I've been looking for a solution that let's me stream H.264 (the 360 dashboard video does not, Media Center with a plugin does) without transcoding or conversion. So far waiting 5 minutes for a file to convert to Xvid to play on the 360 has been superior and cheaper than anything I've found.
Enochrewt
SharvariNasica
Posted 12:39 AM 18/6/08
I got a Mvix 760HD and it is awesome. It has USB Host and Slave, an internal HD 1080i HDMI, Component, optical audio out streams Radio and IPTV and can play just about anything I throw at it. It also has NDAS. Check it out! http://mvixusa.com
SharvariNasica
ezkcdude
Posted 6:06 AM 18/6/08
I don't know that this qualified as a "review". Dude started by complaining that the drive doesn't work well with Mac. Sorry, but are you an idiot? Do you know what NTFS is? Dude then goes on to complain about video quality: "It claims to upscale content, but my low-qual Flight of the Conchords videos looked like junk." Do you know what upscaling is? It's not going to turn your "low-qual" movie into HD. Did you actually think that would happen? If so, how can you possibly be qualified to be doing reviews for this site? I expect Giz reviewers to have a modicum of tech saavy.
ezkcdude
kman13579
Posted 10:50 AM 17/6/08
Rivet for the 360 is great. It actually keeps all of the folders from your mac on the 360, and it lets you input multiple folder locations unlike connect 360. It isn't free, but it is worth it.
kman13579