Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD

Average customer rating: 3.0

Too quirky and poor UI
Good potential, but not for non-technical users
youtube on the boob tube
Not ready for Prime Time
Didn't work and lousy tech support

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Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD

Manufacturer: Netgear
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B000NNBK9O
2007-03-05

Related Categories:

Networking & Online Communication

Networking & Online Communication

Amazon.com Product Description

The Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD frees high-definition media from your computer and moves it to where it belongs--your HD television set. This remote-controlled set-top box fits right in with your other home theater components, is easy to set up thanks to on-screen TV Wizard and PC installation software, and automatically finds and streams movies, videos, music, Internet radio, and photos from your home PCs and storage devices to your HDTV. You can even watch your favorite YouTube and BitTorrent videos while sitting on the couch.

<TABLE ALIGN="right" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="5" WIDTH="405"> <TR ALIGN="center" VALIGN="middle"> <TD> <IMG width="400" SRC="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/house_diagram_eva8000.jpg" ALT="Digital Entertainer HD connected to a home network" BORDER="0"> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> <b>It's Playback Time</b>
The Digital Entertainer HD supports high definition playback of Windows Media Video 9 and MPEG-4 file formats at up to 1080p resolution on your HDTV. It can also play Windows Media DRM (WMDRM10) protected downloaded content purchased from major online services, but that requires Windows Media Connect (WMC) server software, available from Microsoft. The built-in High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port makes clear, high-def connections easy to most recent TVs. It's also adept at other forms of media: music, Internet radio, and digital photos.</p>

The Digital Entertainer HD is able to distribute this content wirelessly through your home by supporting the common, secure wireless communication standard, 802.11g. It also has a faster 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for wired connections. If you want that faster connection speed but dread the idea of running wires through the walls, you could connect to your network using a separately sold powerline Ethernet kit, which safely turns your house's internal power wiring into a data network.</p>

<b>Time Shifting and Room Shifting</b>
Aside from bringing digital media to your living room, the EVA8000 can perform personal video recorder (PVR) functions through a separately sold TV tuner card installed in your PC. Using the two, you can schedule recordings and pause and rewind live TV. You can also take advantage of multi-room playback features with two or more Digital Entertainer HDs. For example, you can set up "party mode" and have music playback synchronized and controllable in different rooms or, if you're watching video, you can pause in one room and resume in another using the "follow me" feature. You can even view and access your PC desktop and remotely access applications like e-mail and a web browser.</p>

<TABLE ALIGN="left" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="5" WIDTH="255"> <TR ALIGN="center" VALIGN="middle"> <TD> <IMG width="250" SRC="http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/media_formats_table_eva8000.jpg" ALT="Digital Entertainer HD compatible file formats" BORDER="0"> </TD> </TR> </TABLE> The device also has two built-in USB 2.0 ports, allowing you to "sneaker net" your media into the living room. Plug in a USB flash drive, digital camera, iPod, or other USB storage device directly into the Digital Entertainer HD and instantly access stored digital media on your HDTV. It supports the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) AV standard and controls devices made to that specification.</p>

<b>What's in the Box</b>
Digital Entertainer HD (EVA8000), infrared (IR) remote control (2 AA batteries included), power cable, Ethernet cable, RCA stereo-audio/composite-video cable, S-video cable, installation guide, Windows Resource CD, warranty/support information card</p>

Product Description

NETGEAR Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 streams movies, videos, music, Internet radio, and photos from your home PCs and storage devices to your HDTV. It automatically finds all the digital media files on your home network and organizes them into an easily accessible library.

Customer Reviews:

Too quirky and poor UI.......2007-06-10

The biggest issues with this product are its quirkiness (instability) and its poorly designed UI.

The quirkiness manifests itself in the box suddenly finding, half way through a video, that it is now "unable to play this media" (even though it was playing it a moment ago). The show stops, and you are thrown back to the menu screen. Now you have to go back and find where you were (no resume playback functionality). At first this was only happening once or twice to me, now it is consistently happening. It is extremely frustrating.

The poorly designed UI means that it's difficult navigating around your media if you have a lot of files. For example, my digital camera video files, which are in my "photos" folder, get mixed up with my TV/film videos all in one massive list. You can group by "folder" but it uses the name of the folder the film is in, so if you have two subfolders called "part 1", all the videos will end up in that bucket, even if the folders up are "Back to the Future" and "The Godfather".

All in all: if money is no issue for you, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, wait for the next generation of these products.

Good potential, but not for non-technical users.......2007-05-16

I really like this device, it's got great potential. However I should note that this unit is for techical users - not-technical users will probably be better off with iTV.

This box plays a lot more formats and has a lot more features - but it compromises on ease of use. If you are the kind of person that likes to tinker - this is definitely a good fit for you. Make sure that 1st thing you do after plugging it in (which was really quick and painless) is register on NetGear forums and request access to beta firmware.

Beta firmware addresses a lot of stability issues of original firmware and adds many good useful features. And access to beta firmware is free, also you can roll back to original one if you'd like at any time.

So far it played anything I tried (about 5-6 different formats). Firmware is being actively worked on, developers are active on the forums and actually listen to feature requests.

Overall I'm very happy with my EVA8000, it does everything I need at a fraction of a cost of Media Center PC.

youtube on the boob tube.......2007-05-07

The Netgear tv box (eva8000 is the official name) had buggy software when I installed it last week. This weekend I saw there was an update to their software and I updated. After this update we were able to get almost flawless performance from the box on youtube (i.e. the sound was not constantly dropping out). The software, remote and response time are all excellent. The product is not apple-like in its ease of use, but then again apple does not let you watch youtube on your tv. The Netgear box is much more ambitious than the apple box and therefore not as easy to use. But with the software update Netgear has a very good product.

As a reminder, the Netgear box operates wireless or wired and can:

access youtube (I have checked it out extensively and it is very very good);

play internet radio (fooled around a bit here and works great);

get weather forecast for your area (works well);

play any song or playlist from your music collection (works well);

play itunes (though supposedly with an annoying delay - I don't buy itunes so did not check this out);

play video (including full HD) stored on your computer (have not tried this yet);

record and playback tv (requires you to have a tv tuner on your pc, which I do not have);

view pictures stored on your hard drive (have not checked this extensively yet but so far so good);

a few more things I have forgotten to mention.

This feature set is much more open (i.e. plays many many more quality levels and formats for music and video) and extensive than the apple tv product.

The software is very good. For example it is possible to watch a youtube video, scroll out to your music collection and pick a song to play, all while the youtube video is playing. If you choose a song to listen to the eva8000 will ask if you want to keep watching the youtube video while you are listening to the song.

The remote has everything well laid out. It would be nice to give the eva8000 an option to plug in a regular keyboard in order to make it easier to search for youtube videos or play music. Or, to have the option to have a high end remote with an lcd screen and qwerty keyboard or scroll wheel.

I think the youtube option alone justifies more than half of the [...] price. Our family (Mom, Dad, and 10, 8 and 2 year old girls) was able to find youtube videos that kept everyone entertained. Always good to have something that will keep the whole family in the same activity in the same room.

Not ready for Prime Time.......2007-05-07

This product needs some software and firmware upgrades to make it a viable media center. Specifically the UI structure still seems to be in Beta mode. Setup was painless (altho if you are VISTA OS make sure you upgrade the firmware), Internet Radio worked well and playing AVI & WMV files worked well, it could not find my iTunes playlists either. But the biggest bust is the confused state of the UI which makes this product unusable (especially for VOB files). Tech Support was from abroad and was awful, they're not familiar with the product and the techy was shooting from the hip.
Looks like i'm going back to my XBOX360 as my media center.

Didn't work and lousy tech support.......2007-04-23

I have a new PC with Vista and this thing kept crashing. I called tech support and got some guy in India that new nothing. Said he would call back and never did. Get an XBOX360 instead - it does all the same things and works smoothly.

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