Kodak Theatre HD Player

by Kodak

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1.2 inches ; 2.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B001BX4NTE
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: Kodak Theatre
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #10 in Camera & Photo > Accessories > Digital Camera Accessories > Docking Stations
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 10, 2008

Product Description

Amazon.com

Forget crowding around the computer, with the Kodak Theatre HD Player, you can relive your memories on your big screen HDTV in stunning high-definition. Invite your friends and family over to show off your personalized slideshows, videos and web content in the comfort of your living room. Then share the excitement by wirelessly sending your content to anyone, anywhere.

Kodak HD Theatre Player Highlights

Wireless access to your picture, video and music collections

• View the pictures and videos stored on your PC, right on your HDTV
• Insert a memory card, USB storage device or plug in your Kodak EASYSHARE Digital Camera
• Connect to popular photo sharing sites such as Kodak Gallery and Flickr for access to your pictures and those from friends and family
• Quickly sort through your new pictures on your TV and send the best ones to your PC for safekeeping
• Make the most of your home theatre system--get to your PC music collection and downloaded movies from the living room

Turn your living room into a theatre of HD memories

• Wirelessly send and receive photos and albums with Kodaks’s Picture Mail feature
• Easily create personalized slideshows enhanced with your favorite songs and transition effects
• Rediscover and relive your forgotten pictures automatically--each week Kodak’s Picture Chronicle feature assembles a slideshow of past pictures taken around the same time of the year

Personalized web media on your HDTV

• Listen to music from thousands of Internet radio stations from around the globe
• Watch your downloaded podcasts, including HD podcasts, right on your HDTV
• Access to the latest free on-demand web channels, including news, weather and sports updates
• Play included on-screen games that are fun for the whole family

Easy to use for the whole family

• Just point and play--the unique pointer remote makes it simple to navigate menus
• Breakthrough user interface designed specifically for an HDTV
• Slim design makes for a natural fit in virtually any home entertainment center (6 inch x 8 inch x 1 inch)
• Personalize your Kodak Theatre HD Player--choose backdrops, change slideshow settings, select your screensaver and more

Product Description

Forget crowding around the computer, with the KODAK Theatre HD Player, you can relive your memories on your big screen HDTV in stunning high-definition. Invite your friends and family over to show off your personalized slideshows, videos and web content in the comfort of your living room. Then share the excitement by wirelessly sending your content to anyone, anywhere.View the pictures and videos stored on your PC, right on your HDTV.Insert a memory card, USB storage device or plug in your KODAK EASYSHARE Digital Camera. Connect to popular photo sharing sites such as KODAK Gallery and Flickr for access to your pictures and those from friends and family. Quickly sort through your new pictures on your TV and send the best ones to your PC for safekeeping. Make the most of your home theatre system-get to your PC music collection and downloaded movies from the living room

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous accessory for your big screen TV, insane remote, November 15, 2008

By 

Daniel D. Briere (Mansfield Center, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kodak Theatre HD Player (Electronics)

I have this product installed on a 50-inch LCD in my living room. We use it to access six accounts worth of iTunes and overall 6000 songs, about 10,000 pictures, and various home videos we've converted to digital. I love my Kodak player. We use it a lot at parties to play music from playlists (can import or create your own), and to show screen images from the photo collection. (I'd like to be able to email photos from here please Kodak as other parents want pictures as they come up!) The remote is a Wii-like remote that works on the TV, and it's great -- all TVs should have this remote. This would make a great gift for anyone with a digital storehouse of info they want to access on their TV. The only issues I had were that I could not mount a network drive (I store my content on a homeserver) and a minor issue that when reported they sent me a patch. Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to access their content on the TV.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I have one, and it's cool., January 7, 2009

By 

J. Gable (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kodak Theatre HD Player (Electronics)

The Theatre player is a really unique device because it does so much more than you might gather from just reading about it, and it has such a powerful new user interface. Comparing this to other set-top boxes is like comparing the first Mac to DOS computers, because the Theatre comes with a remote pointer that is so precise and easy to use that you wonder why it's not everywhere already. And just like the first Mac, it makes the applications on your big screen TV much easier to use and more powerful at the same time.

Practically speaking, here are some key aspects:

1) It displays your photos better than anything else available. Period.
2) It navigates and plays YouTube better than anything else on TV. Period.
3) It's great for playing music and even Internet radio.
4) More features get added over the network.

Photos - It's from Kodak so it's no surprise that it does more with photos than anything else. Partly because you have the pointer, like a mouse on the TV screen, you can navigate through 1,000s of photos from your PC. Or on Kodak Gallery. Or on Flickr. You can make slideshows on the TV, link them to your music, zoom in on photos, mark favorites and more.

YouTube - This application was just downloaded to Theatre boxes this week and it's a real trendsetter. It makes sitting back and enjoying YouTube videos with friends a great group experience. Anyone can do it because the pointer is so natural and features like searching for a video are much easier than with an old fashioned remote -- no more going right-right-right-down-down-down, oops, now I need an "a" again... you get the idea. This app really shows the right way to craft web content for the 10 foot experience.

Music - Other features like playing your iTunes collection (even better now that Apple dropped DRM), are improved because of the user interface. It's easy to make playlists, and you can use the playlists you made on your PC. You can even do obvious things like jumping ahead in a song by clicking on the progress bar, something trivial on PC and not possible with old remotes. Same thing for playing back podcasts and other videos.

Lastly I like that the product improves over time because it is network connected. YouTube was just loaded this week and Kodak is showing some new features at CES that will be loaded later. There are no on-going fees for all this either.

To me it's a great product for big screen TVs, especially in the family room where people can share photos, videos and music. It has memory card slots on the box so you can pop in cards from your camera when you get back from an event and view them without going to the PC at all.

And it's just fun.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I do some work for a company that helped Kodak create this product. That is why I know it well. It's also why I bought one for myself when I could. The cool new pointer and interface will be a benchmark for future products too.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing. I Use It Every Day., April 28, 2009

By 

Brad "Brad" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kodak Theatre HD Player (Electronics)

There are so many things to like about the Kodak Theatre HD Player that it's hard to know where to begin. It's a media extender, like many others, but the difference with this one is that it focuses on you and your content. It's not a gateway to an online store where you can spend more money to view content that other people have created. Kodak has made a media extender that focuses on you; your pictures, your movies, and your music (all right, the music was probably created by somebody else).
The first thing you notice about the Kodak Theatre is that it's small. I had read the dimensions. I had seen the pictures, but when I opened up that box for the first time and saw this thing, I was stunned. It's small. It's sleek and elegant looking. It looks great when sitting next to my HDTV. It also feels very durable. It feels as though it has a great build quality and that it will last forever. Also, it has no moving parts inside, so it is quiet. In fact, it makes no noise whatsoever. (Originally I was debating between a Kodak Theatre and a low-end XBOX 360, but decided to go Kodak mainly because of the noise issue)
The remote is also really cool and really unique. First, it works off a radio frequency (as opposed to infra red) so you don't have to have a direct line of sight to the box to make it work. You can be in the next room with the door closed and still operate the thing with the remote. It's a good size, and when the AA batteries are in it, it has just the right amount of weight as well. The unique feature in the remote is that it's motion sensitive. That doesn't mean you point it at the tv and a pointer moves to where you are pointing like a Nintendo Wii remote. Here, you have a cursor on the screen and if you hold the remote straight, the cursor sits still. Tilt your hand to one side and the cursor goes in that direction until it hits the edge of the screen. Tilt it up or down and it follows right along. I thought that this would take some time to get used to, but it was so intuitive that after a few seconds of using it, I felt very comfortable with it. It makes it a breeze for typing in your network information or searching for things in YouTube.
It was also very easy to set up. As soon as you turn it on (and there is no way to turn it off besides unplugging it), it guides you through a step-by-step process to connect to your network and access your Kodak Gallery account. Kodak suggests that you have a strong connection, and I can attest to that. Originally, the signal the box was receiving was at 40% (which the handy onscreen tool will tell you) and sometimes fast moving video would stutter. I adjusted the placement of my router and got the signal up to 68% and suddenly all those problems went away. Something else to keep in mind is that the minimum hardware requirements for your computer are pretty accurate. My computer just barely passes the test, and while it works, it does take a little while to load, buffer, and view videos. When I use the Kodak Theatre with a new computer, it works flawlessly and fast.
The software that gets installed on your computer isn't the greatest, but it works. One of the other reviewers commented that there is no way to minimize the software, and that's not true. In fact, after you have installed the software and have set it to monitor your media folders, you can close the program. The software continually works in the background and monitors your folders for any changes. When you boot up your computer, the software loads automatically in the background. If you have an older computer, you will probably notice a slight decrease in performance, but for any computer purchased in the last three years, you should be fine.
There are a few downsides though that I feel should be mentioned to keep this review balanced. One, it doesn't support the Mac yet. Hopefully that will be coming, but as of right now it doesn't. Also, it doesn't display the name of the video file you're looking at. So if you have folder with 12 video clips in it, all it's going to show you in a thumbnail for each one. That makes it a little difficult to find a specific file, but since it will display the name of the folder you're in, I just put each video in to it's own folder with a title. Lastly, when watching a video, there's no way to scan back just a few seconds. A lot of times we'll be watching a video and just miss something and wish that we could skip back a few seconds to see it again. Right now what you have to do is put the pointer somewhere on the timeline and select where you want to go. It works, but it's hard to make it precise.
I think it's fairly safe to say that I really, really like this thing. I use it every day. I stream my music library to my TV and listen to music while we're having dinner. I have converted a number of my DVD's to video files, and we watch them streamed to the Kodak Theatre HD. And the best part is that it has a screen saver feature which goes and randomly pulls old pictures up off your computer and displays them as a slideshow. I love this because it's like turning my HDTV in to a giant, continuously changing, digital photo frame.
I'm sure there are a ton of other features that I'm forgetting to mention, but just get one and discover them for your self. This thing is awesome. It's well worth the money, and with the software updates, it's only getting better.