Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite review: Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite

Media streamers have seen something of a resurgence recently. They may have the plethora of pirated video or maybe even personal media collections to thank.

8.3

Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite

The Good

Terrific video, audio and image support; very good picture and sound quality; removable hard drive; good connectivity; excellent networking support.

The Bad

User interface design; price; weak bundled software.

The Bottom Line

The Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite is a good machine. We were very pleased with its picture quality, and if you can make use of the removable hard drive, then it's likely to impress. Because of its size, this machine will appeal to the custom installer market, as it's potentially rack-mountable. Unfortunately, it's not as nice to use as other media streamers, and the price is too high. While it's a good piece of hardware, it's just not quite as slick as it could be

Regardless of your media, the Netgear EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite promises a great deal, including YouTube streaming, a built-in BitTorrent client and the ability to stream virtually any kind of video either wirelessly or via Ethernet networking. It's currently available for around £350.

Design
The EVA9150 has a much more traditional look and feel to it than many of the media streamers we've seen recently. It looks like a traditional cable or Freeview set-top box. For people who like standard-size equipment, it's fine, but it's not much fun for the rest of us.

Overall, its sleek look does win points. At the front, there is a central flap, under which is the removable 500GB hard drive. It's stored in a easily removed caddy -- and pushing a button will allow you to remove the drive. Bear in mind that these drives aren't hot-swappable, so if you're pulling one out, make sure the machine is off first.

The Netgear features a fancy removable hard drive that gives the whole thing a server-farm feel. Just remember, you can't yank this out when the power is on

At the rear of the machine are the usual outputs. There are component and composite outputs as well as a Scart connection, and you'll also find HDMI for 1080p video. Happily, there are both wired and wireless network options. Wired operates at 100Mbps, whereas wireless uses the new 802.11n system, which claims speeds up to 300Mbps.

The remote control included is chunky, reasonably heavy and has a baffling number of buttons. We didn't think the layout or labelling of the keys was especially logical, and that's going to affect the machine's usability.

Features
The Netgear doesn't let up with what it claims to achieve and its feature set is very impressive. Firstly, it can play virtually every kind of media you can lay your hands on: DivX, H.264, XviD, VOB and MPEG-2 media are all playable without any fuss. The EVA9150 was also perfectly happy playing our extensive ISO collection, made from DVDs we've ripped to our hard drive. Blade -- arguably the best movie ever made -- played back over the network in this format.

One attractive feature is the player's handling of protected Windows Media Player 10 content. If you can find some legal, online videos, they can be played back on this device. We'd suggest that BBC iPlayer and 4oD would be good candidates for this feature; however, as the Beeb has moved away from Windows Media slightly, not all of its shows are available in the format -- and certainly no HD is on offer.

Removing the drive means you could pop it into your home PC if you had a compatible hard-drive bay -- at least in theory. We aren't sure how useful this will actually be

Online video is also a big deal for the EVA9150, which claims it can play YouTube videos -- including those in HD -- as well as picking up RSS feeds and other Web media streams. It also gives access to Internet radio, enabling you to access thousands of music stations from all over the globe. Ever wondered what Serbian punk sounds like? The Netgear will help you both find it and hear it.

There is also a selected group of videos from global news sources such as the BBC and CBS news channels. These are a nice idea, but we had trouble getting them to work each time. How frustrating.

Performance
We can't fault the quality of video from the Netgear. We found that HD material was crisp and sharp. Testing with a 1080p MKV file of The Dark Knight proved that this machine has the chops to deliver some amazing-looking video. It was stutter-free, and the motion was smooth and natural.

Various other video clips -- including some HD clips downloaded from NASA -- all played well. We did notice that with some media, the Netgear would moan about not being able to play it, but then go right ahead and play it perfectly. This could easily be solved with a firmware update later, although we're not sure how regularly Netgear will provide updates.

Sound was good via our reference Onkyo receiver and Klipsch speaker systems. That's not much of a surprise, though, given that the signal was sent raw as a digital bitstream over HDMI. The Netgear can happily pass Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA over its 1.3a-compliant output too -- which might be a good trick if you have Blu-ray movies stored on a media server. It won't decode those formats, so you'll need to use HDMI and an AV receiver or you'll hear nothing at all.

We weren't massively impressed by the quality of YouTube videos. Although they were watchable, the HD clips didn't look any better than standard-definitions ones. The YouTube functionality is an area where the user interface lets the you down. Clips play in a small window to start, but you have to press a button on the remote to expand them to full screen. We'd prefer if a clip automatically jumped to full screen.

Round the back, you'll find ports a-plenty, from HDMI to Scart

Unsurprisingly, the weak point for us is the user interface -- both on the machine itself and via the horrendous 'Digital Entertainer' app that sits on your PC to share video, audio and photos with the Entertainer Elite hardware. The software does do the job it's supposed to, but it's ugly, sluggish and basically embodies everything we dislike about Windows software. We can't understand why Netgear thinks it's okay to ship a premium product with software that would have been considered unsightly in the Windows 3.11 era.

We desperately wanted to copy video from our PC onto the Netgear's built-in drive. Because we didn't have a suitable SATA dock on our PC and no mechanism to connect the drive via eSATA, we were left with using the software to send files. Unfortunately, the 'copy to files to your Digital Entertainer' function just refused to work, showing an error each time. This is despite the software managing to stream video to the EVA9150 without any problems.

Also irritating is the 'add folders' functionality. If you set up the software with a particular set of files and later decide to add another file, the app will insist on re-scanning all the previously-added folders. This can cause long waits while the software just repeats itself.

Conclusion
We certainly can't complain about the EVA9150's format support. Of course, it comes at a price, and we think it's will give some people pause. For all-round performance, the EVA9150 doesn't manage quite the gusto of the Popcorn Hour A-110. It's not quite as nice to use, and a sluggish and aesthetically unpleasant user interface doesn't help either.

We think the EVA9150 is expensive and not as good as many of the other media streamers on the market. If you want brilliant, simple video streaming, then the Popcorn Hour A-110 is for you. If you need slightly better photo/music support and aren't fussed about video, you could consider Apple TV.