Digital media player

Multimedia Hard Drives or HDD media player called, are external hard drives that can be connected directly to a TV thanks to additional hardware and software to view photos stored on them, play movies, listen to music or represent other media files. Due to the built-in decoder combines a multimedia hard disk storage media and player in one device. For a large part of the sold today multimedia hard drives, the connection to the TV via HDMI cable.

Market niche

With the advent of the MP3 player itself formed large collections of MP3 music files among users. The same happened to the JPEG image files with the introduction of digital cameras. However, these MP3 files or JPEG image files can not be played or shown readily to the domestic televisions or stereos. For this market gap multimedia hard drives were designed to allow an easy connection and displaying or playing various media formats. Another application of multimedia disks is moving images. They allow the accumulated storage of entire DVD - and Blu -ray collections to which can be accessed via the home theater system.

File Formats

Modern multimedia hard drives typically support the following video formats: H.264, MPG, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG-4, TS, VOB, WMV, MOV, MP4, Xvid, DivX, AVI, MKV, M2TS.

As a rule, the following image formats are supported: JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF.

The support of the above mentioned container formats like MKV and AVI including support of MP3, AAC and OGG as audio format with.

File Systems

Usually, the FAT32 file system is used to ensure cross-platform compatibility. There are also devices with NTFS - but since this is a proprietary file system from Microsoft, there may be incompatibilities when used with other operating systems here.

Equipment

Multimedia Hard Drives have by their compact design usually no or only a small display. The operation is usually done via infrared remote control, with the connected TV serves as a display.

Some multimedia hard disks are used as a streaming client, ie they can play media content from the Internet, without having to store them locally.

Other features may be a recording function or an integrated DVB receiver. These devices are then marked accordingly.

Interfaces

By default, multimedia hard drives via USB 2.0, HDMI and Firewire interfaces. Most models have now also network interfaces such as LAN or Wi-Fi and an optical audio output.