Multimedia hard drive
Multimedia hard disks (also known as HDD multimedia players ) are external hard disks which, thanks to additional hardware and software, can be connected directly to a television in order to view photos stored on them, play films, listen to music or display other media files. Due to the built-in decoder, a multimedia hard drive combines storage medium and playback device in one device. Most of the multimedia hard drives sold today are connected to the television using an HDMI cable.
Market niche
With the advent of MP3 players , large collections of MP3 music files began to form among users. The same thing happened with the JPEG image files when digital cameras were introduced . However, these MP3 files or JPEG image files could not be easily played or displayed on the home television or stereo system . Multimedia hard disks have been designed for this gap in the market, which enable problem-free connection and display or playback of a wide variety of media formats. Another area of application of multimedia hard drives is in moving images. They enable the collective storage of entire DVD or Blu-ray collections, which can be accessed via the home theater system.
File formats
Modern multimedia hard drives usually support the following video formats : H.264 , MPG , MPEG-1 , MPEG-2 , MPEG-4 , TS , VOB , WMV , MOV , MP4 , Xvid , DIVX , AVI , MKV , M2TS .
The following image formats are usually also supported: JPEG , PNG , BMP , GIF , TIFF .
The support of the above container formats such as MKV and AVI includes the support of MP3 , AAC and OGG as audio format.
File systems
Usually the FAT32 file system is used to ensure cross-platform compatibility. There are also devices with NTFS - however, since this is a proprietary file system from Microsoft , incompatibilities with other operating systems can arise.
Furnishing
Due to their usually compact design, multimedia hard drives have no or only a small display . The operation is mostly done via infrared remote control , whereby the connected television acts as a display.
Some multimedia hard drives can be used as streaming clients; In other words, you can play media content from the Internet without having to save it locally.
Further features can be a recording function or an integrated DVB receiver. These devices are then marked accordingly.
Interfaces
Multimedia hard disks have USB 2.0, HDMI and FireWire interfaces as standard . Most models now also have network interfaces such as LAN or W-LAN as well as an optical audio output.
Individual evidence
- ↑ avs / ddp: Multimedia hard disks: data station with TV connection. In: Focus Online . April 20, 2008. Retrieved October 14, 2018 .