This review is a summary of my personal opinions and experience using an iomega screenplay HD multimedia hard drive. Note that "HD" probably refers to Hard Drive not High Definition.

I have been testing out video HTPC's for a while. While I haven't yet built a dream system I have tried several simple configurations. The first requirement of my dream system is that it must be simple to use. My wife and 3-year old must find it easy to use. Our DVD collection is suffering the usual abuse that a child can dish out so I'm pretty motivated.

The multimedia hard drive is a small box (same size as an external usb hadr disk) that has video out connections. You copy your movies to the hard disk using your computer. Then you unplug the hard drive and move it to your teelvision. In theory you can browse, play pause fast forward etc. Think of it as a video juke box of your movie (and photo album) colletion.

Unpacking

1. Power supply (12V, 2A)
2. The Hard drive with a front panel for TV navigation
3. Remote Control (also for TV navigation)
4. Solutions CD (which didn't seem to contain any mac software)
5. 20-page manual with 3/4 a pae of english instructions.
6. 3-foot composit video + stereo audio cable (red/white/yello RCA, 4-pin headphone style jack)
7. 3-foot component video cable (red/green/blue RCA, 4-pin headphoine style jack)
8. 2-foot USB cable

   Initial Problems

   I plugged the screenplay into an apple imac (OSX 10.5). The mac showed the disk drive, but it was mounted read only. Afet a little digging I figured out that the screenplay was formatted NTF which the mac can only mount read-only. I reformatted the screenplay to FAT32 on the mac and that fixed the problem.

   I searched the iomega web site under help, but found nothing about this. It seemed to imply that the screenplay shippes with FAT32, and you can run the formatter they provide to change it to NTFS. Which was the opposite of what I was seeing.

   Video Format Support

   DVD/VIDEO_TS - yes support seems pretty complete. It even honors the UOP (User Operation Prohibition) containers (learn about containers at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats) mp4 - no avi - yes (with ? limitations) vob - yes, see DVD/VIDEO_TS above file names *.mp4 - unrecognized *.avi - recognized * (no suffix) - recognized So simple renaming a .avi file to .mp4 makes the screenplay ignore it file size AVI 2.8GB - ignored video codecs (learn about vidoe codecs at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs) XviD - yes audio codecs MPEG-1 - yes

   macmelton-2:~ rmelton$ time yes "big file" | head -50000000 > /Volumes/SCREENPLAY/yes
   
   real	0m21.187s
   user	0m7.005s
   sys	0m1.134s
   macmelton-2:~ rmelton$ time yes "big file" | head -50000000 > /Volumes/My\ Book/yes
   
   real	1m29.553s
   user	0m7.006s
   sys	0m1.030s
   macmelton-2:~ rmelton$ time yes "big file" | head -50000000 > /tmp/yes
   
   real	0m10.266s
   user	0m7.130s
   sys	0m2.567s
   

   Complaints

   • If the HD has a problem with a file it will skip over that file. This seems nice until you are experimenting with different encodings and containers. You hit play on one and it silently skips to the next file.
   • USB interface is slow. I didn't try to benchmark it but it seems many times slower than my WD external USB-2 hard drive.

Summary

I am not thrilled with this device. It half-way does what it advertises and then it is in a cumbersome way. I searched for encoder software for the mac and ended up using the command line mencode, and handbrake (a custom SVN build off the trunk). I couldn't get reliable results with either even though they played fine on the mac using VLC or MPLAYER. It seemed like avi file size was a problem but I wasn't able to pin that one down. I suspect a more stable version of handbrake that supports AVI/XVid might work as long as you keep the files below 800M.

This will probably just end up being an external harddisk.