12/19/2005
Portable Digital Media Players
There is a cool new class of digital media players out there that really appeals to me. I have 2 ReplayTV’s and I love them. They are networked with each other and I love the freedom of having my TV in a flexible digital format. I have always wanted to take it with me without the hassle of carrying a laptop, and all the accoutrement that goes with getting picture on a TV screen. Several companies now have digital media players that function like portable (playback only) Tivos, and look a lot like an external USB hard drive.
There is the Mediagate MG-25 Multimedia Jukebox, a portable MPEG-4 player, complete with IR remote control. There is a nice review and lots of pictures on Akihabara. This device supports a multitude of video and audio formats, including MPEG 1,2 and 4, Divx, MP3, Ogg, WMA, jpeg. It also has the ability to play back video in VOB containers, the format of choice for DVD’s. This unit comes without a hard drive installed.
Iomega has a device called the Screenplay Multimedia Drive. Just like the Mediagate, it is also capable of playing many popular formats. While I found one review of the ScreenPlay that states that it can read VOB containers, the information on the Iomega site doesn’t mention it. The ScreenPlay comes with a 60Gb hard drive.
UniBrain has the iZak Portable Mediacenter. Mostly the same feature set as the others, but also has the ability to play DVD’s in ISO format, and WAV files. It comes in 40, 80 and 100Gb versions. As the CNet review says, this one is more expensive, and has that annoying “i” in the name, but still a good performer.
