Iomega 1TB Screenplay Pro HD

I'm surprised this hasn't already been discussed, as it's already been out for 9 days

h++p://store.iomega.com/section?secid=40419 (sorry, you'll have to cut and paste and replace the ++s)

I know, I'm going to get the comments like "1080i?!?! Oh, my bleeding eyes!" But not everybody requires 1080p to be happy.

In this compact package, there is
1 TB NAS drive
Ability to playback VOBs, MKS and many other major formats
Media player, can play other videos/music/pictures from anywhere on the network
SD Video capture for camcorder, vcr, etc.
Expandable to wireless via USB
Can add more capacity via USB
Low power consumption

Since I was looking at needing to get a TB NAS drive, a media player, and a DVR, this seems like a pretty good deal to get all of those in one package. I've put in my order to Amazon and will report back when I get it.

I got my new ScreenPlay PRO HD 1 TB drive.

This is going to take me a while to go through all of the features, so I'll post here as I do each one. I finally found better specs for it on the support website. Since I haven't made 3 posts yet, I can't post URLs, so this is the mangled URL:

h++ps://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_na_en.cfg/php/enduser/cust_alp.php?prod_lvl1=991&prod_lvl2=1060&p_prods=991,1060&cat_lvl1=50&p_cats=50&p_pv=2.1060&p_cv=1.50&p_sid=4cAQ78jj

First: My purpose - I wanted a media player unit on which I could store my entire collection of 200+ DVDs (and eventually 50+ VCR tapes that are degrading). I needed something that my kids could use. I wanted something inexpensive. I wanted something that wouldn't use a lot of power when it wasn't being used. And I wanted something that would run quiet but cool. Small form factor and nice looking box would be a bonus, but not required.

My experience - I like the way it looks. It isn't much bigger than my Western Digital MyBook external drive. Plugging it in was easy. I hooked it up to my HDTV via HDMI and to my computer through the USB port. Pressed the power button and voila, I had a new drive on the computer. I copied pictures, music, homemade DVDs, and ripped a DVD onto it last night.

The UI was better than I thought it would be after seeing the ScreenPlay HD 500 GB one, but it wasn't as good as it could be. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile. It starts off listing the different devices you scan display files from:
ScreenPlay Pro (from the 1 TB on board unit)
External USB (for any additional hard drive/card reader you plug into it)
Network (any shared directories on the network)
AV Input (composite input plugs)
Schedule (scheduling the DVR)
Setup

As you browse to the device, it shows the folders from the root directory. You can browse into each folder from there and while at the folder level, narrow your search to Music, Videos, or Pictures. As you scroll down through the list, a preview window on the left side of the screen shows you information about what you've highlighted. So for MP3s, it shows the tags. For videos, it starts playing them (without sound). And pictures -- obviously it shows them. You press play once you've selected the item and it plays.

Now, I am NOT an audiophile, so I really cannot comment on the sound much other than yes, it has sound and I couldn't really hear anything wrong with it. But that isn't saying much, as I have a hearing problem. Setup allows you to switch between 2 channel and 5.1 channel audio. There's a "night mode" (don't know what it does) and S/PDIF can be configured as HDMI LPCM, HDMI RAW, SPDIF LPCM, and SPDIF RAW.

When you browse to a directory that has VIDEO_TS in it, it will automatically launch the DVD in it. I haven't watched a whole DVD yet, but what I did see was impressive. Standard DVD stuff worked fine. Zoom allowed up to 8x zoom and using the arrows I could move around the zoom screen. With it being a hard drive, skipping to other chapters and stuff was without any pauses. I saw nothing that concerned me. In fact, one of my home videos I made played better on this unit than it does in my DVD player. My DVD player skips over the "Show First" video and this thing got it right.

Hooked up to an old analog TV via composite, it selected 480i output automatically. The items on the top/bottom edge tend to get cut off. Due to the interlacing TV, the menu was a little irritating to look at (the horizontal lines need to be double the width to prevent flicker on interlaced TVs). Switching it to NTSC mode didn't help any. But the video on it was fine once I got it launched. I didn't try hooking up the component video cables (composite hook ups are in front, component hookup is in a wire jungle I wasn't prepared to navigate last night).

It was not able to play any videos downloaded directly from my camera (MJPEG format). Nor did it recognize the raw video from the camcorder (AVI DV1 format). Nor could it do the 720p MKV sample file I downloaded.

Picture slideshow capability works well. I haven't tried putting MP3s in the same folder but apparently it will play the MP3s as it is viewing the pictures and going through about 8 different types of transitions. For a quick and easy slideshow, it would do the job.

Documentation totally sucks. And so does the remote. Those are the two major downsides. I have a utility on my computer that I don't even know how it works or what it does. It can make my folders sharable, and apparently has some transcoding capabilities, but I don't know how they work. Looking in the directory, there appears to be bittorent client and several codecs. The remote is small, crowded, complicated, and oddly arranged. for instance, the volume has the + on the left side and the - on the right. On nearly every other remote I have with a horizontal volume layout, they are - on the left and + on the right. The 0 is not below the 8, it's below the 7. Navigating up levels in the menu seems to be inconsistent. Sometimes you press stop, sometimes return, sometimes menu. Othertimes you just give up and press Home and start over. I'm going to be working hard to get this into my JP1 remote.

Playlist manager that comes with it requires the drive to be plugged in through USB to create a playlist, as it doesn't find my drive on the network. Haven't tried a playlist yet.

Network access to the drive is just like a remote computer. It's in the "Workgroup" workgroup and it shows a folder called "ScreenPlay" that you can open and copy files to. But trying to copy files over 2 GB to this NTFS formatted drive doesn't work unless you do it via USB.

There's a telnet client on the drive, but the password is unknown. There's also a web server on the drive that uses CGI and a sample HTML page, but no clue as to how to get further into it. There are also a few partitions on the drive that are "unknown". So there's lots of interesting mysteries for a hacker to explore This thing will keep me occupied for a little while.

So suitability to the job I wanted it to do: Almost perfect. The few problems I've run into can be fixed via firmware update, which Iomega has already shown they do on the past ScreenPlay HDs. For the time being, I can keep my uploads under 2 GB (I haven't tried ISOs yet).

Ok, I've had some time to play with this thing a little more and can give some more information on it.

It has Divx support. It gives a registration number and you can log onto Divx and (apparently) watch movies. I have not yet tried this feature.

But I did try the recording. It records in 720x480 (can't do better with it because the input is through composite). It has several levels of quality. I recorded in HQ, which resulted in an mpeg of about 1.2 GB per 30 minutes. Playback was nearly identical to watching it from the VHS tapes it came from. However, I did experience some problems. It told me "Bad Disc" a few times. When I finally had finished recording about 1 1/2 hours worth, then I was able to record several other files without further problems. Not sure if I really do have a bad disk drive.

Network connections are limited. It uses SMB and limits the connections to one computer. So it can play directly to the screen, and have one incoming connection retrieving/saving additional information.

It was able to stream video from my computer very well. Even over a wireless connection (SPP was plugged into wireless router, other computer had wiresless card). It reported getting 5Mb connection to my computer and streamed flawlessly the DVD I had stored on there. Did not watch the whole DVD, but it seemed very responsive.

I found out you don't have to have the DVD in a folder called Video_TS. You can just have the vobs/ifos in the folder and it will automatically start playing that as well. Or I can play my XVid encoded files by going to the folder where I'm keeping those and selecting the file.

I also hooked up an external USB drive to it and it was able to stream from the drive without problem. One odd thing, though. It starts showing the drive at a lower mount level, so you end up with a directory without a name that you browse to first before it shows you the root folder. Not a big deal, just odd.

And yes, hacking it has been easy, especially since I haven't needed any special equipment to read the firmware or the OS

Do not buy this drive for MKV unless you want to leave your computer on to do the transcoding. The device does not natively support the H.264 format in the MKV package, but it can use your computer to transcode it to a format it can play.

https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/cg...?p_faqid=20311

The drive can handle files larger than 2 GB, as long as you put it on via USB port. I and others have had problems copying over the network any files greater than 2 GB.

No, this device isn't perfect. But it fits exactly with what I was trying to fill. I wanted a device that I could archive my DVDs onto, could stand alone when playing those DVDs back, and would preserve those DVD menus. I also wanted it to be able to record my degrading VHS tapes. So for the price, it certainly feels to me like I'm getting a deal since I cannot get a DVR + Media Player + 1 TB drive for less than $300.

I added a USB Wifi dongle to the drive and it can stream videos stored on my computer without any problems. I can expand the drive by plugging in another USB drive into it. And I'm pleased with the video playback I've seen so far. For an average consumer, I'm very happy with the device. As I said in the first message, I don't think any AV-phile is going to go for it because it isn't 1080p. But not all of us require 1080p to be happy. If that's what matters to you, get a popcorn hour a110.

I wanted to clarify some things on the output and format.

I have a DivX file that is encoded in 720p. This player plays it and it looks beautiful on my HDTV. If I package that DivX in an MKV file, this player will play it the same way. Same with any Xvid I package in the MKV file.

It just can't natively handle the H.264 format, you have to put those files on your computer and transcode.

As far as hacking goes, you can telnet into it. It has a built in http daemon. So you can add your own webpages, CGI scripts, etc. Like I could plug in another hard drive into the back of it, go back to my computer and bring up a webpage to automatically copy the contents of that other usb drive to the internal drive. I've added a file upload to mine, although it's not working well for larger files. I'm in the process now of trying to figure out how to do a cross compile on my linux machine so I can write an executable for the player.

Edit: Also forgot to mention that I enabled the extended USB drive to be accessible over the network.

Well, awesome discovery thanks to klootje.

It appears this device is very similar to some other devices that have been hacked. Namely, the Realtek players, such as the Emtec MovieCube -R100. I haven't been this giddy since my Apex DVD player hacks.

http://rtd1261.wikidot.com/start

delly.x,

Yes, there is a way to copy from the USB onto the main drive. It's slow, and not the way I end up transferring everything. But it works. It's not documented. You highlight the file you want to copy, press the menu button and it will pop up a list for delete/copy/paste. You copy, then go to the place you want to put it and pop up the menu again and select paste.

But it doesn't have a progress bar, and the transfer is slow. Not as slow as the network, but still slow.

reddot88,

The hacking I've done so far is to fix some of the problems with the device. For instance, I found a smbd that fixes the 2 GB problem (and I made it available on the http://screenplayprohd.wikia.com site that I've set up). I haven't done any hacking into the RTD 1262 chip yet, which is where all of the decoding takes place.

I've reformatted the data drive in EXT3, and added a script that makes it easy for me to do a bunch of directories that all have files, some duplicates, without taking additional space. For instance, I have a main directory called favorites, with subdirectories for each of my kids. In each directory is a hard link to the movies they like. Since they have some movies that all of them like, it appears in all of their directories but since it's a hard link, it doesn't take extra space. So there are just a few things like that that I have been hacking.

Slappy,

The discovery will find any screenplays on the local network that are connected either via ethernet or via usb dongle.

Only one computer at a time can be connected to the screenplay, but a simple hack makes it so that more can be.

edit: Oh, and Yes, I've gotten the screenplay recognized in Ubuntu. I'm assuming you mean connecting it via USB, since the OS doesn't really matter if you're going over the network (as long as you have Samba installed). I'm using 8.04, not 8.10. NTFS3G to mount the 4th partition, assuming you've left it formatted for NTFS. I prefer EXT3 on the device.