Gizmodo: screenplay

Lightning Review: Iomega ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive

Benny Goldman — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:30:00 EDT

The Gadget: The Iomega ScreenPlay HD upscaling multimedia drive, a 500GB HDD for playing movies, music and slideshows on your TV set.

The Price: $200

The Verdict: This thing kinda sucks. I was hoping the ScreenPlay would be able to replace my current setup 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 center 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, $200 is steep for a 500GB HD, especially considering Iomega sells others for under $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]

Iomega Screenplay Mediaplayer HDD Does HD Upscaling

Kit Eaton — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:25:10 EDT

Iomega's new Screenplay HD Multimedia drive promises that you can "leave the PC behind" since it stores your movies, pics and tunes and connects directly to your HDTV. You simply save them via the USB2.0 connection, and it's standalone from there on. It can upscale to to 720p and 1080i, plays a wide bunch of formats and connects via HDMI, SCART, composite audio and video or coaxial S/PDIF. With 500GB inside it should be able to store about 750 hours of MPEG2 at 780 x 480 pixels: that's around 500 movies as we mentioned yesterday. It's available now for $218.45. [Iomega and TFTS]

Symbian OS's ScreenPlay and FreeWay Enhances UI and Speeds Downloads

Jason Chen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:33:30 EDT

In addition to the touchscreen UI we saw in Symbian last week, two new features—ScreenPlay and FreeWay—are coming to add even more sophistication to the platform. ScreenPlay is their new graphics engine that allows transparency and animations without taking up too much more battery life. FreeWay is less visible, but it's a new IP networking stack/architecture on 3G networks/WiMax to allow faster audio/video streaming and VoIP calling. Check out the touch video above again just for a refresher.

More Ways to Play Movies On the Road

tgrumet — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:23:32 EDT

Yes, here's yet another USB drive, though granted, this one is a bit special. The new Iomega Screenplay has room for 60GB of data and can play back media on RCA or S-Video TV. Basically, that includes all formats,like MPEG-1/2/4, VOB, DivX and even open-source XviD codec. It also, plays MP3 files and displays JPEGs up to 8 megapixels. An included remote control is a nice touch. Of course, it can also be used as a plain old USB 2.0 hard drive for you slackers. Runs for $219.

Iomega's 60GB DivX/XviD-capable USB Drive [Everything USB]