Photos
The first media I tried out was photos. When I selected my "Photos" directory, I was immediately presented with a slide show of my pictures. This was not really what I expected. I wanted to browse and then select pictures or sub-directories to view.
As I further played with the product, I found this to be the case on all directories. Any time I selected a directory, the music, photos, or video within it would immediately start to play. To see my directory, I had to exit the slide show using the Stop button on the remote. Figure 5 shows a listing of my photos.
Figure 5: Photo Menu
Once again, this is a very basic display showing an alphabetical list of pictures in the directory. If you want any level of control, you need to build subdirectories for each set of photos you want to display. Note that Iomega supports only JPEG still images. For a little more pizzazz in the display, you can hit the "menu" button on the remote to see your photo menu constructed in thumbnails (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Photo Thumbnails
When displaying your pictures, you're always in a slide-show mode, but you can use the pause or stop button for control and use the repeat button to control sequential vs. random playback. According to the manual, the Forward / Reverse buttons were supposed to allow you to move from one picture to the next while paused, but it didn't work for me. There's also a Zoom button on the remote, but it too didn't work while in a slide show.
Music
If you want music to go along with your pictures, just deposit one or more MP3s in the photo directory, but note that they will play back in alphabetical order, so name them accordingly. If you want more control, you can build a m3U playlist file and place it in the directory. Note that when I paused on a photo, it stayed up forever. This means the TV Link has no screensaver, so be careful if you have a TV that is susceptible to burn-in.
For music playback, Iomega advertises support for several formats: MP3; OGG; WMA; and WAV. Figure 7 shows a listing of my music directory.
Figure 7: Music Listing
Like the photo display, it's pretty basic with the little icon next to the file indicating the file type. And again, you'll also want to organize by your files by directory. You probably wouldn't want your whole music collection of 3000 songs shown in one alphabetical list.
Once you hit the Play button, songs in your directory will be played back, either in order or in a random mode selected via the Repeat button on the remote. Curiously enough, the fast-forward button works while playing back music. So if you want to look for hidden a message in your old Pink Floyd album, now's your chance. While playing back music, a very basic display with a progress bar is shown (Figure 8)
Figure 8: Music Playing
Video
The final format I tried was video. Video playback has always been difficult for hardware devices, because there are just too many formats and codecs in use. Iomega advertises support for MPEG1, MPEG2 and AVI containers along with MPEG4 using DivX and XviD codecs. But, as usual with these devices, your mileage may vary depending on your file.
Unfortunately for me, I have hundreds of DVD rips using MPEG4 with an H.264 codec, which is an unsupported combination. But to give playback with supported formats a try, I plugged in one of my large external USB drives and navigated into several directories that contain video files. Like before, as soon as I entered a directory full of videos, the first one would begin to play until I hit the Stop button, so that I could choose what I really wanted to see. This was a bit annoying, as it's not often that I want to play the first video in a large list of files.
The first thing I noticed was that files of unsupported formats just didn't appear. The supported files showed little icons that representing their type (Figure 9)
Figure 9: Video Listing
As I played with the supported files, I noted a few things. The best-supported format appeared to be MPEG2. When playing these files, most of the features such as fast- forward, fast-reverse, zoom, slow, etc. worked as expected. With other format files, using these features was hit and miss. For example, when viewing an AVI file using an XviD codec, none of the special keys such as fast forward/reverse/zoom buttons worked. I also noticed that sometimes a file that had played once wouldn't play again (unsupported codec message) until I powered down and then back up.
Going through my collection of files, I was able to play MPEG2, MPEG1, DivX, and XviD files. I tried to cheat and rename an unsupported format to a supported format, e.g. ".mpg", but it didn't work. The file would show up, but it would have a "?" for an icon. I also noted that the response was pretty good. I'm used to streaming all of my video across the network, so I always get a bit of a lag. But since the TV Link uses a local drive, data is always close to the playback device.
Next, I was curious about all of those DVD-type options, such as "Subtitle" and "Angle" on the remote. Could the TV Link TV play back a ripped DVD in the format of a VOB directory? When I tried, I first got a rather unsatisfactory answer.
First, I selected a directory that contained a ripped DVD. This was followed by the USB disk clattering and a message on the screen stating the directory was being scanned. Shortly thereafter, the TV Link appeared to crash and reset. When I tried again, I got the same result.
The third time I tried, I hit the "stop" button on the remote as soon as I heard the disk start to chatter. This gave me a listing of the DVD VOB directory. When I then hit the Play button on the standard "VIDEO-TS" entry, I was greeted with a normal display of FBI warning, previews, the DVD navigation menu, etc. It was just like a standard DVD. And from then on, every time I tried to play the DVD directory, it worked like it should. I never got the crash again. And when I tried a second DVD, it worked flawlessly.
I don't know what caused the first behavior that I encountered, but it never happened again. Maybe it was caused by some transient flakiness of my drive. But once it was working, it was a powerful feature. Note that I was also using DVDs that were decrypted. The TV Link does not have the ability to play back ripped DVDs with the encryption in place.
Last year, I had spent months ripping and re-encoding my entire DVD collection. I could have done it much, much faster if I had just ripped the DVDs directly without a re-encode. And then as a bonus brought about by keeping the DVD structure intact, I would still have had all of the video special features, menus, trailers, etc.
Terabyte drives are fairly commonplace these days and can be found in the $150 neighborhood and looking down the road, they'll only get cheaper. If you want to do a simple DVD rip, it's fairly quick ( around 30 minutes or so on my Mac). The size of a rip varies, and can be compressed, but 4 GB or so is common for the rips that I have done. This means that a Terabyte drive could hold in the neighborhood of 250 DVDs.
This makes it feasible for many people to easily rip their entire DVD collection and retain the full functionality of the originals with scene selection, outtakes, director's commentary, etc. Nice. PCs and Macs have been able to play back directly-ripped DVDs for awhile. But this is the first multimedia playback device that I have reviewed that could do it. And for less than $100, it's not much of an expense. So with this device and a big USB drive, you could have a large, portable multimedia library that fits in a space smaller than a shoebox. Cool.
