Multimedia Player

[stevo-08]

Looking to get myself a multimedia player/hard drive which I can download movies onto and watch on my TV.

A mate of mine has the Iomega Screenplay Multimedia Drive & loves it (see website below:)
http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=14eeeb26e17fed259ac7b440ba512f64af7:4735&secid=39289#content_tabs

Has a 500GB of memory and he has over 200 movies on it, which he downloaded from his laptop. He then just connects it to his TV via a scart lead. Sounds like just the job.

Im wondering if anyone else has any experience with the Iomega unit or other similar makes/models which they'd recommend.

Cheers
Stevo

[clarshack]

http://www.envizage.com/

i have the 1tb media centre hard drive and the 750gb media centre recorder both filled to the brim with dvd's.

the quality of picture on the 1tb drive seems better than the 750gb drive.

they both get very hot after a while so i wouldnt recommend leaving them on for long periods.

[gerry]

Looking to get myself a multimedia player/hard drive which I can download movies onto and watch on my TV.

A mate of mine has the Iomega Screenplay Multimedia Drive & loves it (see website below:)
http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=14eeeb26e17fed259ac7b440ba512f64af7:4735&secid=39289#content_tabs

Has a 500GB of memory and he has over 200 movies on it, which he downloaded from his laptop. He then just connects it to his TV via a scart lead. Sounds like just the job.

Im wondering if anyone else has any experience with the Iomega unit or other similar makes/models which they'd recommend.

Cheers
Stevo

i have the exact same one for over a year now and have loads of films and music on it.

its easy to use even without the remote control

[stevo-08]

Thanks for the feedback lads. looks like there's 2 good options there. The envizage units seems to be good value for the memory available.

[clarshack]

the envizage 1tb unit by default will display thumbnails of each film which takes forever. however if you press 'file' on the remote it will list the films by name which is a hell of a lot quicker.

[Donagh]

Had considered getting something like this after I got a new telly there recently. The things that put me off though were a lack of DVI/HDMI connections to get the best out of the new telly and wireless connection to transfer movies onto it from your computer. I don't see any mention of storage space so presumably you have to buy a separate hard drive. That means you haven't much room for expansion. 500GB of memory might sound like a lot now but with newer HD movies coming in at 15-20GB each it won't be long filling up.

My solution was to get an old PC out of the office and put a new graphics card with a DVI connection and a wireless card into it. This can be connected directly to the tv or through an AV receiver (along with the audio for surround sound systems) and you can use the wireless connection to download movies directly from the Internet, watch the like of BBC iPlayer, or transfer movies from other networked computers. You also have the option of expansion by putting in more external or internal hard drives and HD or Blueray DVD players for ripping or direct playback. Another advantage of the PC is that you can playback pretty much any format including DIVX, XVID, WMV etc or any DVD's with the region limitations. You can also get those USB dongles to give control with a remote control.

With the addition of the AV receiver I was able to throw out my old hi fi, system and rip all my CD's and DVDs to the computer so was definitely a big space saver for the living room, so the wife was still kept sweet.

[stevo-08]

Had considered getting something like this after I got a new telly there recently. The things that put me off though were a lack of DVI/HDMI connections to get the best out of the new telly and wireless connection to transfer movies onto it from your computer. I don't see any mention of storage space so presumably you have to buy a separate hard drive. That means you haven't much room for expansion. 500GB of memory might sound like a lot now but with newer HD movies coming in at 15-20GB each it won't be long filling up.

My solution was to get an old PC out of the office and put a new graphics card with a DVI connection and a wireless card into it. This can be connected directly to the tv or through an AV receiver (along with the audio for surround sound systems) and you can use the wireless connection to download movies directly from the Internet, watch the like of BBC iPlayer, or transfer movies from other networked computers. You also have the option of expansion by putting in more external or internal hard drives and HD or Blueray DVD players for ripping or direct playback. Another advantage of the PC is that you can playback pretty much any format including DIVX, XVID, WMV etc or any DVD's with the region limitations. You can also get those USB dongles to give control with a remote control.

With the addition of the AV receiver I was able to throw out my old hi fi, system and rip all my CD's and DVDs to the computer so was definitely a big space saver for the living room, so the wife was still kept sweet.

Thats a good point. Didnt realise the size of the HD movies were as big as that. sounds like a good system you have put together there Donagh. Regarding the formats which you can play through the PC - surely the same applies to the Iomega or envizage systems. Looking at the websites, it seems to cater for most media files.

Clarshack, as a matter of interest, roughly how many movies/dvds have you saved onto your 1tb & 750gb units.
Gerry, similar question to you for your Iomega unit.

I initially thought 500gb would be plenty of space but Donagh's post has got me thinking again.

[Donagh]

Had a quick look at the Envizage one there and it seems a good piece of kit but the thing that doesn't do it for me is the lack of a wireless connection i.e. every time you want to put a new movie on it, you'll have to physically connect it to your computer and transfer over. It does play VOBs which is good for ripping your DVDs. I'd download most of my movies so would prefer to have one box that will do download and playback all in one as opposed to have another computer left switched on somewhere else downloading.

It also falls on audio file playback – but that shouldn't be a concern so long as you don't plan to use it for your music and radio system. You'll not get HD playback resolutions either but if your telly can't handle them that shouldn't be a concern either.

[stevo-08]

Yea, I suppose it really depends on what you want to use it for. At the moment I download movies & TV shows onto my laptop and then either watch them on the laptop or create a DVD to watch on the box. A fair bit of hassle and also using up a lot of space on my laptop. So the main reason Im looking at these systems to to be able to easily drag & drop the movies onto a box which can then be played through the TV.

The wireless connection wouldnt bother me so much although I take your point about the advantages of having one box for download & playback.

Why does it fall on audio playback? The Iomega supports MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA & AC3 formats while the Envizage unit supports MP3, WAV & 5.1 Dolby. I wont pretend to be very technically astute so maybe Im missing something there. I do have a portable MP3 player which I just use in the house and have it hooked up to speakers so I'd like to transfer all that music to either the Iomega or Envizage unit and be able to playback through the TV.

I dont have a HD telly but I think the Iomega unit does playback HD resolution which would be an advantage if/when I get a new TV.

[clarshack]

1tb is really 931mb. with the majority of my ripped dvd's being 4.35gb, i have roughly 220 movies on this drive. on the 750gb (698 MB) drive i have 200 dvd's - 50 movies @ 4.35 gb and the other 150 are football dvd's (on average 3.2gb). i need another two 1tb drives to put the rest of my collection on. the main reason why i started to put all my dvd's on to an external drive was because i noticed that when i went to copy some of them again i was getting cylic redundancy check errors. i think this was due to bad burns so i wanted to see how many bad burns i had overall. it turns out i've had 20 bad burns out of 420 disks so far (i normaly use verbatim disks). it is also reckoned that the real lifespan of a DVD-R or DVD+R could be as little as 3-5 years but i dont know how accurate this is. however i didnt want to take any chances.

[gerry]

majority of my ripped dvd's being 4.35gb,

seems alot, most of my films are downloaded from the net and are around 700mb so i am getting over 700 films on my 500g iomega

[Donagh]

majority of my ripped dvd's being 4.35gb,

seems alot, most of my films are downloaded from the net and are around 700mb so i am getting over 700 films on my 500g iomega

They'll have been re-encoded into avi using an xvid or divx codec so won't be the same quality as a full DVD rip (which has already been encoded using mpeg vobs). Each time the movie is encoded in this way you are loosing a bit of quality, hence the downloaded movies being encoded twice will be of a lesser quality, usually more pixelated with poorer colours.

[Donagh]

Why does it fall on audio playback? The Iomega supports MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA & AC3 formats while the Envizage unit supports MP3, WAV & 5.1 Dolby. I wont pretend to be very technically astute so maybe Im missing something there. I do have a portable MP3 player which I just use in the house and have it hooked up to speakers so I'd like to transfer all that music to either the Iomega or Envizage unit and be able to playback through the TV.

I dont have a HD telly but I think the Iomega unit does playback HD resolution which would be an advantage if/when I get a new TV.

It doesn't have a HD output so you won't be able to view them at HD resolutions. You can play back MP3 and WAV(CDs) but not other formats such as wma, but as I mentioned that shouldn't really matter if it's not your primary method of playing back audio (the sound on your telly wouldn't come anywhere near the quality of a proper hifi system). The 5.1 refers to surround sound which will be meaningless if you just have it plugged into your telly, which presumably will only have two speakers. If you wanted to play music, without an AV receiver or amp, your best bet (compromise) would probably be to connect the video output on the drive to your telly and run the audio to your MP3 docking station (if it has an 'audio in').

[Main Street]

For a  stand alone hard disk multi media player with hdmi out, coax out, streaming, ethernet.
there are only a few afaik.
The aptly named popcorn
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/accessories/0,39100116,49297499,00.htm

and  Dvico
http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/accessories/0,39100115,49298114,00.htm

[David McKeown]

I use a mac mini for this.  Great interface and easy to use, also looks well connected to the tv.  Wireless keyboard and mouse allow it to be a complete media station for ripping, watching streaming and surfing the web.  The front row interface also allows you to watch high def movie trailers which I find useful.  Everyone in my student house loved it last year