Toshiba Europe has launched an external hard disk drive (HDD), which will serve as a multimedia player offering a capacity of up to 2 terabytes, enough for up to 770 hours of playback in DVD quality.

The Toshiba StorE TV, optimised for multimedia applications, can be connected to various entertainment and multimedia devices and screens via a wide selection of interface.

The increasing popularity of creating, downloading and sharing movies, audio files and pictures in high quality has led to a high demand for large storage capacity for multimedia content, a statement said.

“With the StorE TV Toshiba introduces its first external hard disk drive dedicated to multimedia applications,” says Leon Gifford, country manager for UAE and Bahrain, computer systems division, Toshiba Gulf.

“It is another important component in Toshiba’s everyday home entertainment portfolio, supporting a broad range of multimedia formats,” he added.

This gives users the freedom to choose the device and screen best suited to them to play music and display photos or videos stored on the device.

The user can navigate very easily and comfortably through the on-screen menu via the remote control which accompanies the device, said Gifford.

The graphical user interface offers easy and quick access to all configuration options, multimedia player functions and stored files.

The Toshiba StorE TV, measuring 170 mm x 46 mm x 111 mm, has a 3.5-inch (8.89cm) hard disk drive and can decode videos in standard definition quality (up to 720 x 576).

The StorE TV can upscale stored SD content to HD quality (1080i) and display it via HDMI on a TV set. It also works with various music formats like MP3, WMA, WAV and AAC, as a video player decoding MPEG2, AVI and MP4 or as photo album which is compatible to JPEG format, the statement added.

Other interfaces of the StorE TV are component video, standard audio and video, and USB. The StorE TV also supports specifications for USB client and host. This enables users to connect an external storage device to the StorE TV and playback multimedia content direct to the screen.

The Toshiba StorE TV will be available during the second quarter of 2010 in the Middle East, according to the statement. – TradeArabia News Service