Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD

Full Review

Iomega is betting that you want a HD Media Player to go with your large screen HDTV, with this product. For the most part, cable TV in India does not yet broadcast high-definition video content. To use a HDTV as intended, a number of people are placing their HD videos on a hard disk using a PC and watching them on HDTV through a media player such as the one under review here. Not only movies, you can also play songs or watch photos scaled to look good on TV. This essentially leads to a device that can playback almost any type of multimedia content you throw at it, but isn’t quite a HTPC (Home-Theater-PC) replacement yet, since none of the HD media players we have seen so far have a DVD/BluRay optical drive or record TV shows.

Keep in mind right at the outset that the Iomega ScreenPlay Director is a top-of-the-line HD media player that offers more functionality than the others available in India now, and that such a premium product has a price tag to match. The “Director” is colored glossy black with a stand to place it vertically. The biggest difference from the other media players we’ve got so far, is the inclusion of a 1TB built-in hard drive, you’ll see more about this later. Another area it differs from other media players which have just a remote alone, is that besides the remote it has buttons at the front - for Power, NTSC/PAL, Stop, Play/Pause, Forward, Rewind, and Scroll. These buttons probably are useful when using the device from close range or can’t use the remote for some reason. Also worth mentioning, is that a HDMI cable is included in the package. Along with the customary CD and “Quick Start Guide”, there is a sneaky promo brochure included that tells you there is an optional WiFi-N Adapter that can be ordered from Iomega.

As with other media players with LAN ports, this one also lets you access media content located anywhere on your home network. The Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD is visible as a network drive on your home network, so it's easy to copy media files on to its drive. However, loading the media streamer's hard drive up with movies may take some time as it does not offer a Gigabit Ethernet connection. It also allows accessing content on some media sites online. You can also use it as a torrent (peer-to-peer) downloading box, a functionality seen in some NAS boxes till now. The Seagate Barracuda LP 1TB hard drive built-in to the Director offers 929 GB of usable capacity. This is a partition formatted into NTFS (Windows-usable), so it would need re-formatting for use on a Mac. We also noticed that it had some other partitions - one 256 MB partition (presumably for updates or firmware purposes), two more 256MB partitions, and lastly a 1GB partition formatted in the ext2 filesystem of Linux. There is a USB port specifically meant for accessing the Director like a USB hard drive from a computer, and USB speeds recorded were right in line with any other USB HDD (because the USB port’s speed limitation of 33 MB/s comes into play). Notably, there is a vent at the back with an exhaust fan to throw out heat, although thankfully the Director did not even get “warm” to the touch, atleast as observed from the external plastic casing. There is also a facility at the back for using a Kensington lock with it, to lock it in place.

The Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD happily outputs in 1080p Full HD resolution, with a menu system that's slick, stylish and richly coloured. With a simple vertical layout for choosing between music, video, photos and online media, the ScreenPlay Director HD should be easy for novice users to pick up quickly. You can set simple video options, such as choosing between widescreen and standard 4:3 aspect ratios for displaying video. The on-screen interface makes searching through your media relatively straight-forward. Anyone with particularly large music or movie collections - though we're talking tens of thousands of titles - might find the navigation through the folder structure a tedious process, but this also depends on how you have your music sorted. You can only scroll through files alphabetically (there are no artist or album tags, for example). The upscaling quality seen while playing normal resolution video was as good as the Asus O!Play HDP-R1 reviewed here. Photos and music played just fine, although support for FLAC audio files was spotty. Playing DivX or WMV videos encoded at full HD (1080p) resolution was good, however this media player also has problems with 1080p high-bitrate MKV-encoded movies. For details of the ports offered at the back and multimedia file-formats supported, see the “Specifications” tab of this review. Iomega offers a three-year warranty on this product.

Bottom Line

The Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD Media Player finally brings to India a media player with a hard disk built-in - a large 1 TeraByte drive at that. It is at par with other products of its category in almost all other aspects. It gains points due to this unique functionality, but also loses some since its pricing approaches close to that of building your own HTPC.