NETGEAR EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite

• Plays video, MP3, and digital photos from your PC, Mac or network attached storage (NAS) to your HDTV
• Streams media directly from the Internet such as YouTube, Internet radio, Flickr photos, RSS, and podcasts
• Automatically finds all digital media files on your home network and organizes them into an easily accessible library
• This EVA9000 series includes a 500 GB hard drive (EVA9150) for extra storage of movies, photos, and music
• Includes HDMI port, HD upconversion up to 1080p, Wireless-N, two USB ports for iPod and USB drives

This is a pretty cool unit. Setup is a breeze and it even came with a DVI cable to hook up to my TV. It also has RCA cables. I have almost 1TB of movies in various formats(.avi .wmv .mpg) and it plays every one. Sometimes I cannot use the skip function if it doesn't fully support the file but it still always plays it. Transferring the files over was a bit harder. It was going to take 7 days to copy 1TB of files over from my server to the hard drive on the unit that I put in it. I even tried a direct cable and it was just as slow. I don't think it does any conversion but it is very slow. When you add a new hard drive in this unit, it formats it with Linux. When I put the drive from the Digital Entertainer in my Windows server it wanted to format the drive. I had to boot into a Linux OS and then I was able to copy the files over very quickly. The software that comes with the unit is pretty nice also. It lets you tag each movie file with information from the Internet Movie Database. It even displays a box cover. This unit also stores and plays music as well as Youtube videos streaming from the Internet. It will connect to your network by wireless or wired, or it can simply be a standalone unit. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars was because of the search feature in the unit. When I want to search for example, the movie "Zoolander", I input the letter "Z" from the remote and instead of filtering every movie that starts with "Z", it lists every movie with the letter "Z" in it like this...

American Zombie

Brazil

Crazy People

Dazed and Confused

Hot Fuzz

Zoolander

It's kind of a convoluted search in my opinion. Other than that, the Digital Entertainer is a top notch unit. It has a very user friendly interface with a nice remote control. It also has 2 USB ports and it can play media directly off of those or the media can be transferred to the hard drive. Netgear did a good job on the Digital Entertainer Elite!

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Let me start by saying I was NOT looking for a Windows Media Center Extender, I was looking for a device that could handle my library of stored media (movies and music), especially it's ability to play DVD images, including the disc menus. For this purpose (provided you have a wireless N or wired network connection) the EVA-9150 is a solid choice, handling virtually any file format you can throw at it without problems. The Digital Entertainer Elite also streams Internet radio stations, and has a nifty RSS feed reading applet built-in.

An application is included that does a decent job of helping you catalog your media library, including tools to help facilitate the creation of tags for media files. My favorite feature in this by far is the ability to go pre-fill a tag with information from IMDB: just go to the page for the movie, click the "fill" button, and all of the information about the movie populates the appropriate fields!

The EVA-9150 includes a 500GB hard drive, but unless your home network is slow and you're having buffering problems, I doubt it would be of much use. If it is, you can swap it out for drives of up to 1TB in size.

Output options are plentiful, including HDMI, component and digital outputs, as well as standard composite and analog audio, so interfacing to virtually any home theater system is realatively easy. Wireless and wired networking are built in and easy to use, and software is included to help you catalog the media on the various devices you may have around your house. Overall, I found everything relatively easy to use for a person familar with PCs and home theater, though the sheer number of options may be intimidating to a novice.

One place where there's room for improvement is the 9150's ability to play various forms of streaming video from the Internet. Netgear will be releasing a firmware upgrade later this year that will allow the EVA-9150 to stream video from providers such as Amazon, Netflix and Hulu using a service called PlayOn that streams these and other services from your PC.

Another sticking point for some users of this unit is it's rather paltry support for Blu-ray file formats. For example, the unit can't read an image of a Blu-ray disk that's stored on hard drive, you can only play back the main movie file, and even then the unit doesn't currently support pass-thru of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD signal to your home theater system. While Netgear is working on these issues, it's unclear as to when a fix might be coming out. (I'd recommend a TivX 7000 for those who want this capability, but their spec sheet sports a similar "to be supported in a future release" quote for TrueHD and DTS-HD support.)

As Netgear adds more capabilities to this unit with each firmware upgrade, they'll have a device that will be harder and harder to beat. For now, they merely have the best way I've found to make media stored on PCs, Macs and network attached storage devices playable on your home theater system.

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If you are someone who had downloaded hundreds of movies off of the internet or maybe you have a massive home movie collection that you want to be able to play on your TV instead of on your PC then this product might be for you.

I tried over 20 different Blu-Ray discs with none working properly only to find out from Netgear that Blu-Ray is not fully supported. It will only play in the .M2TS format but (like most Blu-Ray audio formats it is in HD) the HD audio feeds will not be played from the player and will only play if you have a separate speaker set up. I thought that that was not such a big deal since I could stream to this device from my PC as well. The buffering feature does not work properly and audio drops out for minutes at a time. I have an N network so it is not a network issue.

This product also claims to play premium content. That is a lie! It will stream premium content from your PC ONLY! All of the content that I have purchased from Amazon On Demand does not buffer properly.

After talking about all of these issues with Netgear and with (the company I purchased through on Amazon) for over a month all came back to me and said "We won't take it back." If you are thinking about purchasing this product I would tread softly. Personally I would purchase an HP mini and hook it up with an HDMI cable to your TV. You are guaranteed to have better results then the EVA1950 and it will operate USB drives with ease. Just a personal thought though.

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I bought this device because it has one of the broadest list of supported codecs I had found, and so far, this device has played everything I've thrown at it. I store my DVD and Blu-Ray collection on a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 2-Bay 1 TB (1 x 1 TB) Desktop Network Attached Storage RND2110 and it streams to my 52" TV beautifully. However, as I mentioned in the title of this review, it has a bit of a learning curve (part of the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5). First, the firmware it ships with is total trash mine kept crashing, so one of the first things I had to do was update the firmware. Since then it's been running smoothly. Secondly, the nagivation menu and the remote are not very user-friendly. The remote is a mess, there are a so many buttons and they are very close together. Once you figure out the menus, how to set up a library to browse, and how to actually browse the files without searching forever, you will be satisfied.

Getting into actual performance, it does exactly what it is supposed to do. It runs entirely separately from Windows Media Center. I think you can use the EVA9150 in WMC but I haven't bothered to try yet (What's the point? That would be like driving your car to work and then walking back home so you could walk to work.). It comes with an HDMI cable, which is so helpful you'd think this would be a standard inclusion with any device of this caliber, if you spend 200 dollars on a Blu-Ray player, does it really kill them to throw in an HDMI cable so you don't have to go buy one yourself? Contrary to what prices in electronics stores will have you believe, they're not expensive at all... but I digress. Anyway, I have yet to find something it won't play. There have been times when I thought something was not compatible at first, but I would find out there were other reasons for this more on that below. Digital copies of Blu-Rays look and sound outstanding. There is even support for multiple language tracks, if the file has it. For the record, I streamed Blu-Rays ranging from 4.5 GB to 12 GB over my wireless-N network through a couple of walls with relative ease, all that happens is it doesn't buffer as fast as with a regular Ethernet cable. Right now my unit is hard-wired because the EVA9150 can't connect to my wireless network, but this is due to unrelated technical problems I'm having that I haven't figured out yet and not because of a malfunction in the unit. I should also give a passing mention to the picture and music streaming as well I've only experimented with this since that's not the reason I purchased this item. They work, as they should; picture and mp3 streaming is much simpler than video files.

A couple of gripes/annoyances I have about the unit, aside from the ones I listed above:

If you rename a file the EVA9150 won't know where it is, and if you try to play it you will get an error message saying you're not connected to the network or that the file is not compatible. This is confusing at first. If you choose the "Quick scan for new media" option it will find the file with the new file name, but the old one stays in the library. The only way to get rid of it is to do a full scan for all media which starts over and takes a couple of minutes, you can't remove things from the library. Annoying.

If you're using an advanced audio codec with surround sound, it may not play audio if you're not using a surround sound receiver. At first this led me to believe the EVA9150 didn't support these codecs, but I put it on a receiver, and it does. The tv's HDMI input on its own could not process that signal. This doesn't indicate any problem with the device itself per se, but shows that if you're going to spend $400 on this, you really should have a HDTV with 1080p and a stereo system or you're paying for far more capability than you need, in my opinion. There are less expensive options for media receivers that support less advanced codecs, and just like you wouldn't have any use for a Blu-Ray player on a standard-definition TV with no stereo system, you also wouldn't have any need to play DivX files in 1080p with 6.0 surround sound from an advanced media player on the same TV unless you planned to upgrade.

Skipping, fast forwarding, and rewinding is a chore. The fastest it can go is 4x and you can skip to certain marks in the movie (40%, 60%, etc.) but only if the movie has buffered to that point. Fast-forwarding beyond that point is useless and doesn't move much faster than real-time. I suppose this is a fair trade-off for pushing a button to watch the movie vs. loading a disc. There is also no way to bookmark a place in a movie.

You can't buy this without the 500 GB hard drive which you may or may not need, and in my case I don't. It comes in handy for buffering, but I don't have any other use for it. I don't store files on it or anything. Oh well, not really that big of a deal.

Bottom line, if you have the green for it, if you have several different types of codec in your library don't like your equipment telling you it can't play certain ones, and if you have a little bit of patience, the EVA9150 is worth a look.

Bought this unit some weeks ago. Looked nice and easy to use. (I am an IT specialist, so I am used to deal with complicated stuff). Plugged this into my home theater and first surprise: the image quality was total crap. It's a lie that it outputs 1080p. Next surprise: the menus are cumbersome and do not provide adequate control of the different options. The Internet radio is poorly organized and there is no way to do a search on some standard way. In addition, the pre-loaded radios are by far much less than other products like Logitech or Noxon. Then it came the connectivity issue. It connected fine with my wireless network, but refused constantly to connect with any of my Windows 7 computers despite it claims to be UPNP capable. Conclusion: packed it back and sent to the supplier. This is the second big flaw I have with Netgear products.