Iomega, known for its NAS devices has for some time now churned out a couple of media playing devices, upon which the ScreenPlay Director professes to improve.
The ScreenPlay Director isn’t just able to stream media from your network. It also has a built-in hard drive for storing files on it. This comes NTFS formatted, which is good because there’s no 4GB file size limit (as found with FAT32). I am not too sure if Macs can read the disk natively. A formatting tool is provided, if needed.
The built-in hard drive also accounts for the ScreenPlay Director’s fairly large dimensions of 145mm x 76mm x 185mm. Not that size is a particular problem with a device that will sit beside your TV – portability is hardly a necessity here.
Both 1TB and 2TB models are available, and as the drive isn’t (intentionally) user-upgradeable you’ll want to pick the right capacity from the start. Pricing isn’t too bad though, with the 2TB model costing about AED1300 while the 1TB device just under AED1000. A USB-B connector on the device facilitates transfer of files to the ScreenPlay Director from a PC.
The additional cost of the ScreenPlay Director’s built-in hard drive over a pure media streaming device probably isn’t one you’ll want to swallow if you were just streaming. However, if you don’t want to keep your PC on constantly and don’t have a NAS device to store your media, it makes good sense. Plus it makes transporting your media to a friend’s house simpler – you don’t have to remember to copy files to an external storage device; they’re already on your player.
The ScreenPlay Director will output 1080p/24Hz video, if provided with it, at the native frame rate. 1080i, 720p, 576i/p and 480i/p output is also supported, unsurprisingly. Of course resolution is only half the story – it’s no good being able to output to 1080p if you’re only playing DVD rips.
Fortunately, the ScreenPlay Director can handle just about every media format going, and certainly all the ones a user would want it to. The full menu is pretty long, but it includes important video formats such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, AVCHD and VC-1, and common containers such as .avi, .m4a, and .mkv – subtitles will display, if provided.
Review product courtesy of Iomega Middle East
There’s no denying it: media streamers are definitely cool devices to have. Playing digital media on a PC is all well and good, but it’s obviously better to do so via a TV or projector.
