Kit of the Year Apple‘s Apple TV was launched in 2007, but it has taken until 2009 for rivals to really get to grips with the notion of a device you can use to play local and network-connected content on your TV. Too many storage vendors have tried their hand, offering good content capacity but usually accessed through a slow, poor UI. Western Digital got it right by leaving out the storage – you add your own – and getting network connectivity.
Western Digital WD TV Live
The WD TV grows up. The original was a great way of hooking up a hard drive full of content to your television, but the Live makes the gadget a fully fledged network media player, allowing you to hide the HDD right out of the way. It’s not perfect – the UI is still a tad clunky and inconsistent in places – but it does the job and its format support is excellent.
Review Iomega’s original ScreenPlay Pro network media player was a bit of a mixed bag. It had very good connectivity features, including a video input option that allowed it to capture video as well as simply playing audio and video files that were already stored on it. However, it was let down by its inability to play H.264 video – the format used by the ubiquitous iPod and numerous other devices.
Iomega’s ScreenPlay Director
Needless to say, the first thing we did when we received the new Screenplay Director HD was to check whether it could handle H.264. It came through that test with flying colours, although we did discover a few other rough edges along the way. Even so, it’s clear that Iomega has put a bit more thought into this model than it did with its predecessor.
At first glance, the Director HD appears identical to the earlier ScreenPlay Pro. It’s a slim, glossy unit that looks like a fairly conventional hard disk, albeit with a few extra buttons on the front. Our review unit had a 1TB hard disk inside it and costs £179, and there’s also a 2TB version available for £309. Read the rest of this entry »
