First Looks
The ScreenPlay Director is a substantial looking unit, and whilst plastic, has a feel of quality. Only the dull grey buttons on the front of the unit feel a little cheap and utilitarian.
Shipped with a vertical stand, the product is going to be difficult to tuck away into a TV cabinet, unless you have sufficient width between shelves, which is a drawback. Otherwise, you can lay the Screenplay Director on its side, but it looks very clumsy. I much prefer a DMR to be able to be positioned horizontally, so it can be positioned easily in your cabinet – I want to look at the TV, and not have the DMR in constant view!
At the front of the unit, you’ll find a set of control buttons in case you lose the remote, including up, down, left/rewind, right/fast forward, play/pause and stop. The buttons spoil the aesthetic of the product unfortunately – it would have been better to have these controls hidden behind a flap. As well as a front power button, strangely you’ll also find a button to switch between PAL and NTSC, which is firstly odd for a high definition product, and secondly I question the need to have such a control conveniently placed on the front of the unit. Do people have to switch between PAL and NTSC on a regular basis?
Around the back, you’ll find a fan to cool the internal hard drive, three USB sockets allow the connection of external drives as well as an external wi-fi adaptor. You’ll also find the 10/100 Ethernet socket, HDMI, optical audio, additional USB for connecting the DMR to a PC, component sockets and a security lock.
The ScreenPlay Director is well connected, for sure – I would have preferred to see Gigabit Ethernet on board rather than 10/100 as Gigabit routers are becoming increasingly common, but you should be absolutely fine streaming high definition content as is.
The remote control, unsurprisingly, feels a little lightweight and cheap but is comfortable to hold. The buttons are a too “squishy” for my liking, but do the job. A green LED at the top of the remote control confirms your button press.
Connecting the ScreenPlay Director
Setting up the ScreenPlay Director is very easy – simply connect it to your TV via HDMI, connect an Ethernet cable, and plug it into the mains. If you’re connecting the product over wireless, you will of course need to ensure you’re connected to the network before accessing content on your network.
The first boot of the ScreenPlay Director (and it feels like a boot – you’ll hear the hard drive spin up and a progress bar appear) takes a little time as the software initialises. After a minute or so, you’ll be asked to set-up the product.
The product set-up is short, simply asking for language, screen aspect ratio and network configuration. Once the network is selected, the ScreenPlay Director will report on which devices on the network it can find. Over Ethernet, it successfully discovered a desktop PC and two home servers on the network.
When powered on, if there is no other noise in the room, you’ll hear a faint whirring from the ScreenPlay Director’s fan, but it’s quiet and certainly won’t spoil any viewing.
Once set-up, you’ll see a succinct menu, offering just five options – Music, Video, Photos, Online Media and Settings. The menu is large, friendly and best of all, responsive to the remote. Leave the menu on screen for a while and an animated screensaver kicks in with the Iomega logo.
