Have a lot of multimedia files on your computer? Tired of watching them on your crammed monitor? Well, you will need the “Iomega ScreenPlay™ TV Link, Director Edition” Digital multimedia receiver.
You may have many beautiful / memorable photographs captured in your expensive digital camera and you wish to show it off you your friends in the living room. This should give you an idea what I am hinting at; a Digital Multimedia Receiver (DMR).
Before I dwell into the capabilities of a good Digital Multimedia Receiver, I must give you some background about its prerequisites (HDMI and Upscaling).
HDMI
Most televisions made in the last decade would at least have AV composite input ports and the newer ones have HDMI ports. The HDMI ports can carry enormous amount of data (between 4.9 Gbit/s to 10.2 Gbit/s) that translates to HI Definition content on your television and your home theatre.
Most common HD resolution found in Plasmas, LCDs and LEDs is 1920 × 1080 with an aspect ratio of 16:9. If your television states Full HD, it should be able to display multimedia content with the aforementioned resolution.
Upscaling
I found a well written write up of Upscaling from Wikipedia:
Upscaling/upconverting DVD players contain a scaler, which allows the user to convert lower resolution content into a signal that the display device will handle as high definition content. Depending on the quality of the scaling that is done within the upscaling/upconverting DVD player, the resultant output quality of the video displayed may or may not be improved. The idea behind upconverting DVD players is that when a DVD player is connected to an HDTV, especially one of the fixed pixel display type such as LCD, Plasma display, or DLP and LCoS projection TV, scaling happens anyway, either inside the player or inside the TV.
The aforementioned features are a must for a good DMR and there are many good ones available in the market. There are ones that have a built in hard drive. You can use them as a pen drive and copy multimedia contents and then play it on your television. There are some models that offer WiFi connectivity and you can stream video from the Internet websites like Youtube and download files from torrent sites. With the exception of built in hard drive, this device is on par with the others.
If you have a hard drive, you can just connect it to one of the 3 USB ports available. You can a buy a WiFi adapter to enable Internet connectivity for this model.
This model upscales pictures and videos taken from a low resolution camera and makes the end result look good, if not amazing.
Given below is the technical specification of Iomega ScreenPlay™ TV Link, Director Edition:
Now let me move to the pros and cons of this player.
Pros:
Yes, this is not perfect but for Rs.4,500/- this is a good deal. You are free from hooking up your desktop or laptop to enjoy multimedia files in your living room. If you are familiar with computers, you would come across multimedia files such as, *.divx, *.mkv, *.xvid, *.avi, *.mp4, etc., and you would wonder if there is any way to display this on your expensive television, look no further.
You may have many beautiful / memorable photographs captured in your expensive digital camera and you wish to show it off you your friends in the living room. This should give you an idea what I am hinting at; a Digital Multimedia Receiver (DMR).
Before I dwell into the capabilities of a good Digital Multimedia Receiver, I must give you some background about its prerequisites (HDMI and Upscaling).
HDMI
Most televisions made in the last decade would at least have AV composite input ports and the newer ones have HDMI ports. The HDMI ports can carry enormous amount of data (between 4.9 Gbit/s to 10.2 Gbit/s) that translates to HI Definition content on your television and your home theatre.
Most common HD resolution found in Plasmas, LCDs and LEDs is 1920 × 1080 with an aspect ratio of 16:9. If your television states Full HD, it should be able to display multimedia content with the aforementioned resolution.
Upscaling
I found a well written write up of Upscaling from Wikipedia:
Upscaling/upconverting DVD players contain a scaler, which allows the user to convert lower resolution content into a signal that the display device will handle as high definition content. Depending on the quality of the scaling that is done within the upscaling/upconverting DVD player, the resultant output quality of the video displayed may or may not be improved. The idea behind upconverting DVD players is that when a DVD player is connected to an HDTV, especially one of the fixed pixel display type such as LCD, Plasma display, or DLP and LCoS projection TV, scaling happens anyway, either inside the player or inside the TV.
The aforementioned features are a must for a good DMR and there are many good ones available in the market. There are ones that have a built in hard drive. You can use them as a pen drive and copy multimedia contents and then play it on your television. There are some models that offer WiFi connectivity and you can stream video from the Internet websites like Youtube and download files from torrent sites. With the exception of built in hard drive, this device is on par with the others.
If you have a hard drive, you can just connect it to one of the 3 USB ports available. You can a buy a WiFi adapter to enable Internet connectivity for this model.
This model upscales pictures and videos taken from a low resolution camera and makes the end result look good, if not amazing.
Given below is the technical specification of Iomega ScreenPlay™ TV Link, Director Edition:
Now let me move to the pros and cons of this player.
Pros:
· Plays most of the multimedia files.
· Well built remote.
· HDMI, Digital optical line-out and Ethernet port.
· Good value for money.
· HDMI cable included.
· Compact size.
· Ability to play files straight from a portable Hard Drive.
· Brush Metal finish.
· Upscaling support
Cons:· White Subtitles with no shaded border.
· Subtitles are not automatically displayed.
· NO MUTE BUTTON on the remote and redundant keys. The remote has 2 sets of up, down, left and right keys for navigation. The play and pause button function can be repeated using the enter key.
· Photo display layout is not appropriately designed. Once you enter the subfolder of a folder containing photos, you have to go to the home screen and then navigate to return to the previous folder. This happens only when you view photos.
· High Resolution MKV files do not play after upgrading to the latest firmware; specifically ones encoded in 1080p and 720p with Dolby digital audio. This confirmed by the technical support folks at Iomega. They have informed me that, audio cannot be routed through HDMI port; instead it can go through the optical line-out port. Surprisingly, high resolution files of 1080p encoded in m2ts format with Dolby digital audio plays fine.
Conclusion: Yes, this is not perfect but for Rs.4,500/- this is a good deal. You are free from hooking up your desktop or laptop to enjoy multimedia files in your living room. If you are familiar with computers, you would come across multimedia files such as, *.divx, *.mkv, *.xvid, *.avi, *.mp4, etc., and you would wonder if there is any way to display this on your expensive television, look no further.
----By Prashant Thankappan
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