Keeping things simple is often times the best bet when it comes to getting your digital media onto your TV–and, it would seem, Iomega’s ScreenPlay TV Link is going to help do just that.
The next generation DVD war made everything pretty confusing. HD DVD lost that war, but a new study says people aren’t rushing to jump into Blu-Ray, either. Perhaps understandably, since already the next next generation DVD formats are being discussed, with Pioneer claiming it can do a 16-layer Blu-ray disc that will hold 400GB.
So, what’s a video-loving dude to do? Well, there are a lot of possible solutions out there. Iomega is hoping you’ll want to just dump everything onto hard drives that you can then plug in to their ScreenPlay TV Link device. If it works as promised, the ScreenPlay TV Link will be able to play media off of any drive plugged into its USB port.
From the sound of it, this thing is a great compromise for dedicating an entire computer to your TV set, like so many folks are doing these days. And for the under-$100US price-tag that Iomega has slapped on the ScreenPlay, there’s quite a bit of bang there for your buck.
For starters it can play off of an NTFS or FAT32 drive (the two most predominant storage formats) AND it can output to your TV in either NTSC or PAL (the two most predominant TV/video formats). Based on the official product page for the ScreenPlay TV Link, there are quite a few pros and a couple cons, unfortunately, as well.
The Pros:
1) Supports all of the major media formats including MP3 (duh), AC3, WMA, WAV, OGG, MPEG-1/2 (AVI and VOB) and DivX/XViD MP4. This, essentially, makes it just like an iPod only a bit more versatile and a bit less portable and without the screen and storage, of course.
2) Sports an HDMI output and can do 480i/p and can upscale to 720p/1080i. Not the greatest specs, but hey, for $100?
3) Composite and component video outputs plus a SCART for European users. This gives users a nice bit of legacy-oriented freedom.
4) Supports FAT32, NTFS hard drives or flash drives. Hell, you could probably plug an iPod in hard disk mode into the thing and play stuff of off it.
The Cons:
1) It’s from Iomega. Sorry guys, it’s hard to forget how crappy those Zip drives were.
2) It’s one thing to support a stack of formats, it’s another to actually have the processing power to play them, you know, smoothly. This is a trap many other media-playing hard drive enclosures have fallen into.
3) No S-Video output. Component and composite outputs, but no S-Video love. So, the ScreenPlay TV Link provides partial legacy support, at least.
4) They couldn’t sneak a little love for Mac users in there? Is HFS that difficult a hard drive format to support? Ah well…
5) The website doesn’t specify how many USB ports are on the thing, so one must assume, it has just one. Kind of sad, but not a deal breaker.
5) It doesn’t record.
This last part seems to be the Holy Grail of cheap, standalone digital video players. It’s also not a deal breaker, but it would be nice if just one company would put together an inexpensive, simple, little machine that could do everything Iomega says the ScreenPlay TV Link can do and record HD video.
Until then, we can all keep ripping our DVDs.
