Here’s a growing trend among storage manufactures. Have storage products, will carry multimedia players too. We’ve seen this with Western Digital, Netgear, and of course Iomega. Iomega had two of their latest multimedia players on display at CES 2009 – the ScreenPlay Pro HD Multimedia Drive with 1.0 TB of disk space and the hard-drive-less ScreenPlay TV Link device.  The ScreenPlay Pro HD Multimedia Drive is the company’s high end, networked multimedia player with a built-in 1.0 TB hard drive, while the ScreenPlay TV Link is an inexpensive media player without a built-in hard drive.

Here’s a quick summary of features for the two products.

For the Iomega ScreenPlay Pro HD Multimedia Drive, you get:

• Connects to your home network
• Store and access videos, music, and photo collections
• Browse the network for media
• Record SD video from camera, cable box, or VCR with one-touch capture record button
• Supports native HD
• Audio Formats – MP3, WMA, OGG Vorbis, DTS, AAC, AIFF, PCM, M4A, AC3, WAV
• Video Formats – MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (HL/ML), .MPEG-4 (part 2, ASP), DivX (3.11, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, HD), Xvid, AVI, mov, iso, vob, mp4, mkv
• Photo Formats – JPEG and BMP
• SCART, HDMI, Composite Video, Component Video, Coaxial S/PDIF output
• Video upscale to 1080i
• Supports USB Wi-Fi dongle
• Available for $299.99

For the ScreenPlay TV Link device, you get the following:

• Compact, affordable multimedia player
• Connect a USB hard drive formatted in either NTFS or FAT32
• Video upscale to 1080i via HDMI
• Energy efficient
• includes remote control
• Audio Formats – MP3, AC3 (Dolby® Digital Encoding), WMA, WAV, OGG
• Video Formats – MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB), MPEG-4 (AVI/DiVX 3.11, 4.x, 5.x/XViD)
• Photo Format – JPEG
• HDMI, Composite Video, Component Video
• Measures 3.26 x 3.07 x .78 inches and weighs 0.22 lbs
• Available for $99.95.

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