News Netgear's Digital Entertainer could replace HTPCs

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/08/netgear_s_digital_entertainer_could_replace_htpcs/1

Netgear's Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 looks to be an incredibly smart device that could wipe out the need for an HTPC.

 

Looks very nice. Presumably silent too?

 

very interesting wonder what the video quality is like looks like a winner tho. although i would still prefer a PC to play the odd Big screen game on

 

during the demo I saw, video quality looked superb.

 

i was waiting for something like this on the horizon.....

 

Ugh, it's missing a dvd drive. How am I supposed to play all the stuff I have backed up?

 

I've played with a couple devices like this but the flaw is ALL of them so far has been the windows media center style interface that is severely lacking. I keep videos and music in long folder trees to sort them and I basically want a windows explorer type interface to view and select the content to play. I also want an interface that will properly play DvDs stored on my harddisks. The pictures I see don't look promising.

 

This player looks cool.
Does it do upscaling too, so that your lower-res movie files are scaled up nicely for your TV or does it leave that to the TV?

Put it in a DVD drive shared on the network?

Maybe you could create a network share somewhere with shortened names that has shortcuts/mountpoints to the proper location of the files?

 

oh this looks nice but please oh please tell me that it supports wireless N ...

 

Look like a copy of the apple TV but without the ties to the apple store and itunes. Will probably be quite hackable I expect.

 

Very swish

 

...it automatically discovers media on storage devices and PCs connected to your network...

Do you really want a device to automatically find ALL the pictures and video's on your PC and make them available to anybody touching the remote?

(Like...your girlfriend, your grandma, a visiting friend)



Xir

 

Any idea how big a drive this has in it for recording and possible upgrading?

 

It seems it has a usb connection so maybe a external dvd/hd-dvd/br drive could be connected to the netgear

 

Not sure it would even have a drive, and what would it record?
I don't think it has a tuner in it...

 

I came really close to buying an EVA 8000 last year but got worried that it would just end up being another £170 piece of hardware that doesn't play all media formats.

Ideally, it would play, h.264 (.mkv) 1080p encodes yet from the reviews I read - it was apparent it was not up to actually doing this - even over the gigabit home network.

would like to see a proper bit-tech review!!!!

 

the wireless feature when paired with HD content is said to be useless. To be used with any content that is over for example 700MB/Hour - it would need to be wired.

 

with it being netgear does that mean youll need to install software to make the networking to your pc work like their nas boxes?

 

I'm not sure all their NAS boxes would need the software.

 

Are we going to get a full BitTech review of this? Am really considering getting one of these