Iomega ScreenPlay Plus Media Player
Reviewed by walterh via 
on 06 Feb 2010
The Iomega ScreenPlay plus is a device that can store your entire DVD collection on a single 1"x8"x5" box that sits on top of your TV. The device costs about €160 to €200 euro and is available from SoundStore in Cork or many Electronics shops.
The device can connect to your TV and to your computer. You will need a computer and software such as DVDShrink or DVDFab (both are easy to use) to copy your DVDs on to the device but don't worry - this isn't too difficult.
Why would you want to buy a device like this? Well for us it was really simple - we have 2 young children and a modest collection of children's DVDs. Little fingers and DVDs don't mix well. Very often DVDs will begin skipping after repeated use and wear and tear. It's great being able to pick any DVD from an onscreen menu and play it without the hassle of handling DVD packaging and remembering which DVD goes in which box.
The ScreenPlay Plus is basically a 1 TB (1000 GB) hard-drive with a chip that can play movies that you plug into your TV. In case your wondering, that means it can store about 250 DVDs.
The device can also play music - I've copied my entire music collection (250+ CDs) on to the device, though frankly it's a terrible music player. It doesn't even let you play a song while browsing for other songs (as you'd typically do with even the most basic MP3 player).
It also does photos and has a pretty nice slideshow feature which lets you play music to accompany the photos. You can even setup individual playlists for each photo folder.
I'm really happy with the device but my one disappointment is the on-screen menus. Frankly they're ugly. Menu navigation could also be improved. It seems just a bit too fiddly having to choose the type of media then navigate to the folder for that media. I'm sure this could be made more intuitive so that the underlying disk's folders are less visible. On the other hand, it is nice to be able to create folders for different categories of movies. All our kid's movies are under the /VIDEO/Kids Movies/ folder.
The other drawback is that the device doesn't support MPEG4/H.264 (Hi-definition) so while there is a HDMI out socket for connecting to modern hi-def TVs, you can't watch H.264 movies.
Overall I'm pretty happy with this purchase. It means we can now watch movies without them skipping. We can also put our DVDs in storage so they don't take up space on the living room bookshelf.
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Comments
Conor O'Neill at 11:30 - 06 Feb, 2010 said:
Sounds like a great device.
I'm surprised those ripping tools worked for you as the nasty sleazy studios now use all sorts of tricks (forced errors etc) to block basic ripping tools.
I've ripped our DVD collection to hard disk using AnyDVD for overcoming the anti-copy stuff and CloneDVD for shrinking them. I love enforcing my fair use rights.