Using the ScreenPlay Director HD
One aspect that lets down many DMRs is the quality of user interface, which can range from “aesthetically compromised” through to “I have no idea how to get this thing to work”. The ScreenPlay Director’s menus are clear and look great, but dig down into the media players, and things get slow and confusing. More on this shortly.
The Settings menus are fully featured and allow you to tweak a host of settings, including video resolution and photo transitions, parental controls, audio and network settings as well as check for firmware updates.
Once again, the menus are responsive, although there’s a tiny lag before the sub-menus appear, which is a little annoying.
Music
Browsing music on your network is relatively easy by navigating through your devices as found and displayed on your network. The ScreenPlay Director did a great job of quickly finding all of the PCs and two home servers on the network.
However, the fluidity of accessing the main menus comes to a juddering halt when accessing network devices. There’s options a plenty for navigating through your music, although no search option, which is a big missing. More seriously, navigating through large music collections can be slow as the ScreenPlay Director accesses and pulls titles from across the network (even over Ethernet this can be way slow) and from time to time menu scrolling locked up completely.
I’m not sure how the ScreenPlay Director caches the results it finds when browsing over the network, but it’s internal hard drive starts whirring away as soon as you start browsing and things start slowing right down. When you’ve finally found a track you want to play, you can wait up to 6 seconds before it starts to play. Once the track starts, streaming is fine, but it’s laborious getting there.
The playback screen looks good, but lacks intuition. Whilst your tunes are playing, it’s difficult to browse for the next track to play (that you’d ideally like to play after the song that is playing) without the current track stopping and the tune playing immediately. It’s hard work, and the visual playback experience is very basic – no sleeve artwork displayed, no funky visualisers. You get your music, and that’s your lot.
A great remote can sometimes save a dodgy DMR – unfortunately, Iomega’s remote suffers from a lack of a Back button to aid navigation between menu layers and would benefit from alphanumeric keys to speed up locating the track, artist or album you want to play.
After a promising start from the ScreenPlay’s setup and top-level menu design, music playback is a disappointment.
Photos
Confusingly, the Photo menu is set-out completely differently from the Music menu. As you can see above, in Music, you’re presented with a list of devices on the left hand side of the screen. Go to Photos, and it’s all icon based.
It’s as if someone completely different developed the Photo application, and forgot to chat to the Music guy to see how they were doing things! Much like Music, the visual experience whilst browsing your photos is functional – row upon row of generic folder and network icons – where are the thumbnails, guys?
Amazingly, even at the lowest level of the menu – where I’m browsing a set of jpegs, there’s no thumbnails and the icons have gone! Wow.
Video
Head over to the Video section, and clearly the Music and Video guy are pals, as we’re back to the device list again, this time in a pleasant shade of red. At this point, with my experience of Music and Photos, I’m starting to get worried about what’s going to happen in Video.
Again, navigating through content on the home server, the Iomega’s hard drive goes nuts, but like music, there’s plenty of options for browsing your videos.
Actually, Video playback is relatively good. The ScreenPlay Director found all of my content, and successfully played back all of our test formats, including MKV high definition video. But it’s not 100% – there’s a couple of seconds of lag when resuming video playback following a pause, and whilst forwarding video works well, rewinding/reviewing video wasn’t as successful.
If I was filling in a report card at the point, it would look something like:
Music – D
Photo – C-
Video – C+
