Gizmodo: digital entertainer hd

Netgear 1080p Digital Entertainer HD Official

Jason Chen — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:10:11 EDT

Netgear's EVA8000 that we saw in January has finally become official. Not only does the Digital Entertainer HD have 802.11g and can stream MP3, WMV, WMA, MPEG1/2/4, AVI, WMV, and XviD, it can play back video at up to 1080p over HDMI or component.

Its other cool features are a PVR extender for PCs that have a tuner card on board, multi-room playback with multiple Netgear boxes, and the ability to play back YouTube on your TV. The only thing we see missing is Windows Media Center extender and DivX support, but otherwise this looks pretty solid. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Netgear]

Netgear's 1080p Streamer Caught on Video

Louis Ramirez — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:41:10 EST

Ok, so the video is painfully blurry, but the folks at Tech Blog have posted up a clip demoing Netgear's forthcoming Digital Entertainer HD. The box is capable of accessing and organizing all your stored media and streaming it to your HDTV with support for 1080p video. The interface is pretty bare as you can see and at times it lagged a little longer than it should (especially at the end), but feature-wise it's packing a lot and it doubles as a PVR (if your PC has a TV Tuner card). It'll be out this quarter for $349.

Product Page [Tech Digest]

Netgear, BitTorrent Box Streams 1080P To Your TV

Matt Buchanan — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:35:11 EST

New developments coming out of the Netgear/BitTorrent partnership: breaking into the universal streaming media market, Netgear's Digital Entertainer HD tries to make good by packing a cornucopia of features into its rather large box. Using draft-N, it's able to stream video in 1080p, as well as most any other media content (MP3, WMA, AAC and other music formats) from your PC to your TV, all of which is automatically recognized and can be tagged and organized with cover art and other meta-data. The unit handles all of the scaling automatically, displaying content at the highest res the TV can handle. It also has a built-in PVR (though you need a connected PC with a TV tuner card to use it) with a Tivo-esque interface. On the upside, you can control the TV tuner with your remote as well.

More deets and Netgear's Storage Central Turbo after the jump.

Using the same proprietary software to deal with the TV tuner, It also supports iTunes, though the uncomfortable silence from the reps indicates the officialness of that is iffy at best, so we'll see if that particular feature makes it to market. You can, however, hook up your iPod, as well as any other mp3 player or mass storage device. Rounding out the package is the "follow me" feature, which allows you to pause a movie on one receiver, and then resume it on a receiver in another room. Granted, that means you need of two these babies, which is not a cheap proposition at $349 a pop. Or you can use party mode, which plays everything synchronously all of the receivers on the network. Oh, and it has direct access to Youtube. Woohoo? Drops in early '07.

Netgear also showed off the Storage Central Turbo (pictured above), a network storage setup which supports "terabytes of SATA storage" and fail-safe disk mirroring (though you have to supply your own hard drives.) They claimed it's 6x-7x faster than any other network storage device with gigabit speeds, with the ability to transfer an HD movie in about 10 minutes. Same vague release time frame as DEHD, $249. – Matt Buchanan