Multimedia Network Drives

“The Future of Home Entertainment?”
by Andrea Dunning

In a world of digital cameras, Hulu, Pandora and YouTube, the ability to access media files from anywhere in your house is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Multimedia network drives/players plug into your TV and allow you to directly access your digital media files with your TV or other networked device, without using a computer as an intermediary. More advanced models also allow access to online media.

There are three main players in the U.S. multimedia network drive market: Iomega, Western Digital and Seagate. As multimedia network drives have been on the market only a few years, features have not been completely standardized across the market. Each company’s devices offer a variety of features, but no device offers all features, so buyers really have to think about how they’re going to use the device before settling on a particular model.

There is an important difference between a multimedia drive and multimedia player. The multimedia drive is designed to be primarily a network drive that holds your media files and plays them on your television. A stand-alone media player does not have hard drive capacity, but will stream media from your network and the Internet, depending on the capabilities of the player. A particular product may combine both the hard drive and player limited in streaming capability, although the current emphasis seems to be on dedicated media players—especially in regard to Netflix streaming. Ultimately, it would be expected that all the features of network drives, digital video recorders (DVR), and network/Internet streaming would be combined into one box, but this is not yet the reality.

Figure 1. Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD Multimedia Drive (left) and ScreenPlay Plus HD Media Player (right).

Iomega offers two models of its ScreenPlay multimedia network drive. The standard version, ScreenPlay Plus, offers file access only, while the premium version, ScreenPlay Director, also allows access to online content, such as Flickr, Internet radio, RSS feeds and podcasts. It used to be able to access YouTube, but if you dig deep enough you’ll learn that YouTube made some changes in April, and ScreenPlay is no longer able to access the site. Hopefully they’ll patch it up soon, since the company is still name-dropping YouTube in its advertising.

ScreenPlay Director also comes with Protection Suite software. ScreenPlay Plus comes with 1TB of storage, while ScreenPlay Director has 1TB and 2TB models. Both models can be connected to your home network via Ethernet cable, but the ScreenPlay Director is also wireless-ready, though you need to buy a separate Wi-Fi adapter.

Figure 2. Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV HD Media Player (right) and FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player (left).

Seagate has two products competing for the same market: the FreeAgent GoFlex TV HD Media Player and FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player. These two devices connect to your home network via Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi (with adapter), and files saved on attached drives can be accessed by networked computers. You can stream directly from any networked computer or the Internet (including Netflix, YouTube, vTuner, Picasa, and Flickr). GoFlex has access to Paramount; Theater+ doesn’t. GoFlex works with GoFlex drives (or any other USB drive); Theater+ works with FreeAgent drives (or any other external hard drive). You can purchase Theater+ with or without a hard drive, but GoFlex can only be purchased on its own. Features are nearly identical on the two models because GoFlex was released a year after Theater+ and is basically just an updated version of the device.

Figure 3. Western Digital’s WD Elements Play (left) and WD TV Live Plus (right).

Compared to Iomega and Seagate, Western Digital’s multimedia offerings are a little behind the times. Western Digital has WD Elements Play, which stores media, plugs into your TV, and that’s it. The device has no network connection. Files have to be transferred via USB connection from your computer to the drive. The drive then has to be physically moved and plugged into your TV.

Western Digital’s networked device is WD TV Live Plus. This device can stream from any networked computer, Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, Flickr, and Live365.com (Internet radio). WD TV Live Plus, when connected to an external hard drive, can be used as a network drive, but only if you modify the firmware (which undoubtedly voids the warranty).

Figure 4. Emtec Full HD (1080p) HDD Multimedia player and recorder S800H.

Now, the Emtec Full HD (1080p) HDD Multimedia player and recorder S800H is probably the best multimedia network drive on the market. It supports streaming and transmission, can connect through a router or directly to wireless devices, supports Internet radio, can replace your DVR, and has an integrated Web server that allows you to set up a BitTorrent to access files remotely. Or seed a torrent with all of those totally legal things one tends to do with torrents. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Europe. If you search around a bit you can find them available for import, but the DVR function doesn’t work with U.S. TV. Emtec is starting to enter the U.S. market, though, so hopefully we’ll be seeing U.S. versions of these devices in the future.

LaCie also offers a range of multimedia drives, although they do not seem to be set up for streaming video such as Netflix.

All in all, if you’re looking for multimedia network drives, you’re going to be looking within a limited scope of products. Not all of them stream, not all of them have integrated memory, and WD Elements Play doesn’t even hook up to your network. None of them will replace your DVR yet (though judging from the Emtec S800, that is probably on the horizon), so you will have to find space for yet another device beneath your TV. None of the devices currently available in the U.S. can be accessed from the Internet.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Most of the devices available support HD (or at least come in an HD version), USB ports are plentiful, and most of the sites you want to stream from work with most of the devices. Of course, if you happen to live in a household with an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, you already have a multimedia network drive/player comparable to any on the market.