Review: Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ A Star

HD media players have been increasing in popularity as home networks continue to grow. Allowing you to play all your digital media in a home theater setting, initial devices were buggy and limited in the file types they could play. Over the past year or so, manufacturers have taken their customers' comments and complaints to improve their products with each new generation. The recently released FreeAgent Theater+ (the plus differentiates it from its predecessor) by Seagate is the latest example.

Like popular competitor Western Digital's WD TV Media Player, the FreeAgent Theater+ is designed to take advantage of portable storage devices, in this instance, the company's FreeAgent Go portable drives. The small and thin (6.89 x 6.89 x 1.18 inches) device has a removabl epanel on its top that slides off to expose a dock specifically for the FreeAgent Go drive.

Setup is fairly straightforward; the device connects to the network with an Ethernet cable and to a television via component, composite or HDMI cables. Digital Audio is also supported with an optical audio jack. The FreeAgent Go can slip into the dock or be plugged into the two additional USB 2.0 ports. These ports can also be used to connect other USB storage devices, including flash drives.

The user interface is very clean-looking and easy to navigate with the included remote. Reviewers noticed a slight lag between pressing the remote's buttons and the unit's reaction, but not to the level of being annoying. Broken down into five icons, the main menu consists of Movies, Pictures, Music, Internet and Devices. When used with a FreeAgent Go drive, the media player automatically scans the drive and indexes the media files so they can be found by selecting the icon of the respective type. Other devices, including those on the network, must be accessed through the Devices icon.

During our testing, we ran into a small issue with the Devices feature; although the media player showed the computers on our network, and allowed us to log into them, it again prompted for a username and password when we attempted to access any of its drives.

Originally, we thought the problem was resolved when we configured the drives to be shared (which is necessary), but the issue persisted. Eventually we got it working by creating a new user in the computer, giving that user share access, and logging in with those credentials. We believe this is most likely a problem with our Windows configuration since connection to other storage devices, such as a NAS, worked flawlessly. Although not necessary for use, the player comes with software to sync files between networked computers and a FreeAgent Go drive installed in the unit.

The last icon, Internet, consists of a few widgets that can pull data from the Internet. Currently it is populated with a weather widget, and some for photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Picassa, but Seagate plans to eventually add more.

What really makes the FreeAgent Theater+ stand out from its current competitors is its extensive list of supported formats. Along with the expected file types, there are many that users of previous media players have been requesting for a long time.

With resolutions up to 1,080p, photo types include JPEG files up to 20 megapixels, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIFF. The supported audio formats are AAC, MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, ASF, FLAC, WMA, LPCM, ADPCM, WAV, OGG, and M3U and PLS playlists.

The vast list of supported video files is made up of MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (DivX /Xvid), DivX HD, Xvid HD, AVI, MOV, MKV, RMVB, AVC HD, H.264, WMV9, VC-1, M2TS, and TS/TP/M2T. Of particular note are the DVD formats which the device plays natively, complete with any menus and subtitles. In testing, this support worked perfectly.

The Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ ships packaged two ways; the device alone has an MSRP of $149.99, but it can also be purchased bundled with a 500-GB FreeAgent Go drive for $289.99. An optional 802.11 Wi-Fi dongle is expected to be available soon for $79.99.