Netgear Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000

Cool Yule rating: 5 stars
Price: $349.99
Product Web site
Buy this at Amazon.com

Description: From out of the box all the way to playback, the Netgear Digital Entertainer provided a great user experience. Netgear's EVA8000 provides a wireless connection (wired Ethernet is also supported) to your digital media stored in another location (either on an attached network server or another PC), as well as the Internet to access things such as weather reports, RSS feeds, news items and YouTube videos.

The box included HDMI as well as composite cables to support most everyone's high-definition equipment (I used the HDMI connection). I was pleasantly surprised to immediately set up a Wi-Fi connection without first needing to connect it via Ethernet to perform basic configurations.

Audio and video playback of my stored media files was excellent. The EVA8000 connected to my local storage via a shared drive, and scanned for any media supported, including MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, WMA, Xvid, JPEG, BMP, PNG and TIFF files. The library listing clearly segmented the audio, video and photo files for easy playback, and included great filtering options.

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Cool Yule rating: 5 stars
Price: $349.99
Product Web site
Buy this at Amazon.com

Description: From out of the box all the way to playback, the Netgear Digital Entertainer provided a great user experience. Netgear's EVA8000 provides a wireless connection (wired Ethernet is also supported) to your digital media stored in another location (either on an attached network server or another PC), as well as the Internet to access things such as weather reports, RSS feeds, news items and YouTube videos.

The box included HDMI as well as composite cables to support most everyone's high-definition equipment (I used the HDMI connection). I was pleasantly surprised to immediately set up a Wi-Fi connection without first needing to connect it via Ethernet to perform basic configurations.

Audio and video playback of my stored media files was excellent. The EVA8000 connected to my local storage via a shared drive, and scanned for any media supported, including MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVI, WMA, Xvid, JPEG, BMP, PNG and TIFF files. The library listing clearly segmented the audio, video and photo files for easy playback, and included great filtering options.

Even over a wireless connection, the EVA8000 was able to provide excellent audio and video output (although a slower wireless connection did give me some buffer delays). Over a fast 802.11g or Ethernet connection, the quality seemed flawless, and the fast-forward / rewind features worked perfectly. Even the introduction of disk activity and network congestion gave us good responsiveness.

Other features allow for direct USB connection, so an attached USB device with media files on it can play through the system. If you have a TV tuner built into your computer, you can use the EVA8000 to view the programs on the connected TV. The user interface was easy to use, and it had a well designed remote control. While typing in URLs wasn't that easy, Netgear provides a Web client interface as well, so you can enter your favorite Web sites and RSS feeds using a PC and then using the remote to navigate to them on the TV.

This product exceeded my expectations and truly enabled a new level of media enjoyment. If you're looking for a way to view or listen to digital media files stored on a PC or other storage drive on a TV or stereo system, look no further.

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