Iomega Screenplay Pro HD Multimedia Drive. Enjoy High Definition Theatre at Home

Now that digital cameras have forced the film camera back into the dark room, digital music has replaced vinyl records and video tapes are a thing of the past, a new problem has arisen. How can we store and enjoy all these digital files?

While a digital camera lets you look at your vast collection of digital images, and MP3 players and other portable devices allow you to listen and watch on the move, many of us like to enjoy movies, still images and audio in the comfort of our homes on large screens, and in high definition and high quality sound formats.


You can achieve this on the Iomega Screenplay Pro HD Multimedia Drive, first introduced at the end of 2008.

As the name suggests, the Iomega device connects to your home TV system and lets you view and listen to your multimedia files in your own living room. The device allows storage for up to 4 million digital photos, more than enough for all those holiday snaps, or 18,500 hours of music, that¿s over 2 years of continuous listening and over 1,500 hours of video.

The Iomega drive is basically a 1 TB 3.5 inch external hard disk, which you can connect to your computer by either a 10/100 Fast Ethernet or USB 2.0 connection, the latter via a Wi-Fi dongle. The drive supports a large variety of audio and video format files, including JPEG, BMP, ISO, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. It's worth noting that the Iomega only works with Windows based computers, however.

With the files loaded from your computer, it is time to connect the Iomega drive to your TV. The device comes complete with connecting cables for HDMI and composite video, and has output sockets for component video, composite RCA and coaxial S/PDIF audio. It also has composite video and analogue audio input sockets to enable video recording directly from a video source, such as a set-top box.

The device comes with a remote control unit that features a confusing range of buttons, which are not always consistent in their functions on different menus. Some users may prefer to simply rely on the controls on the front of the 145mm x 76mm x 184mm, 0.98kg main unit, but apparently none of the main unit controls allow you to back out of menus which is a distinct disadvantage.

However the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of the Iomega Screenplay Pro HD Device, which allows access to a wide range of multimedia files on your home network to be enjoyed in high definition format on your home theatre.
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