There are two main ways to watch movies on your TV: playing the disc directly from a standalone or using a multimedia drive.
A multimedia drive basically is a hard disk drive (HDD) installed on an external box provided with all necessary interfaces to be connected directly to a TV. The main advantage of this system is that you can store on a large disk a lot of movies and there is no more the risk of a stuttering playback if the disc is dirty or scratched.
Iomega introduced recently the ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive featuring upscaling capabilities so you can use this device also with a large screen. As already said, with all connectors already in the box there is no need to have a computer to use this piece of hardware, but of course you need a computer to rip your disc collection and to transfer movies on the HDD.
The portable ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive comes with a remote control for easy navigation. Inside there is a 500GB 3.5 inch 7200 RPM hard drive formatted with the NTFS file system. Video connection options include HDMI, component and composite video, and SCART (RGB). Audio connection options include composite RCA and coaxial S/PDIF outputs. PC transfers use the USB 2.0 interface. USB, composite video, and component video cables are included.
Using the HDMI or component outputs, the user can choose video settings from 480i/480p/720p/1080i (720p and 1080i are achieved through upscaling). Supported media formats include MP3, AC3 (Dolby® Digital Encoding), WAV, WMA, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB), MPEG-4 (AVI/DiVX 3.11, 4.x, 5.x/XViD) and JPEG.
The Iomega ® ScreenPlay™ HD Multimedia Drive USB 2.0/AV 500GB is now available in the Americas for $209.95. (Price is U.S. suggested retail.) The Iomega ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive is expected to be available in international markets in late May for €179.99.
More details about the drive can be found here.
