Seagate has come up with a new gadget Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ 500GB, with finer capabilities in areas of audio and video, and can prove a best gizmo for home use.
Interestingly, in case you're new to the whole USB media player category, it goes something like this: storage brands like Western Digital, Seagate, and Iomega are looking for ways to tap into the growing number of consumers who have multimedia files stored on their computers and want to bring them to their TVs without much fuss.
Game consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 offer similar functionality as part of their extensive repertoire (as do some Blu-ray players), but products like Seagate's FreeAgent Theater+ Media Player are targeting a more price-conscious consumer who doesn't want--or need--to deal with a full-fledged console.
This latest series reviewed here is the "plus" version of the Theater HD, and it addresses many of the complaints we had about the early version that was released in April 2009. Instead of just offering a component video connection, the Theater+ adds HDMI with 1080p output (for easier hook-up to an HDTV and higher maximum resolution), an Ethernet connection (for streaming digital media files over a network), and better file support (it reads more file formats).
This model’s game consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3, with their built-in hard drives, are also able to read and play back a wide assortment of files via USB and network streaming. On top of that, both systems have additional features that this box is missing: the 360 offers DVD playback, Netflix streaming, and online video rentals, while the PS3 has video rentals, excellent slideshow functionality for images, a Web browser, a Blu-ray player, and built-in Wi-Fi. On the other hand, the PS3 currently doesn't play back those Flip Video pocket camcorder files with which the Theater+ has no problem.
This new string will never be able to measure up to mini-computers like the PS3, but it's half the price of the Sony, and has the appealing traits of being compact and reading the vast majority of AV file formats out there, including a few the PS3 doesn't read. While we wished the Seagate offered Netflix streaming like the Roku box does, overall we liked it a lot, and have no problem recommending it, particularly if you already if own a Seagate Free Agent Go drive.