NETGEAR EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite

by Netgear

Product Details

User Manual [1.48mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 17 x 10 x 2 inches ; 10.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 11 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• Shipping Advisory: This item must be shipped separately from other items in your order. Additional shipping charges will not apply.
• ASIN: B001P80FGA
• Item model number: EVA9150
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

The NETGEAR Digital Entertainer Elite EVA9150 brings your computer and home entertainment system together to provide you with a great sensory experience--without the complication of wires! You'll be able to watch high-definition videos, view photos, and listen to digital music on your HDTV and high-quality stereo system--directly from the integrated hard drive or from your PC, Mac, or network attached storage (NAS) device. The Digital Entertainer Express also lets you browse and play popular movies and TV shows from PlayOn, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, and more.

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The NETGEAR EVA9150 makes it easy to watch HD media from your computer on an HDTV. View larger.

The included remote lets you control your media from the comfort of your couch. View larger.

A slim design and versatile, fast connectivity make it easy to integrate into your network. View larger.

Watch Digital Media on Your HDTV and Home Entertainment System
You've downloaded your favorite shows and the latest movies from the Internet, and you've also got a giant collection of MP3s stored on your computer or NAS device. Thanks to the Digital Entertainer Elite, you can now watch and listen to your digital collection in the comfort of your living room.

Why settle for watching your movies on a small computer monitor or listening to music on small tinny speakers? Whether your files are stored on a PC, Mac, or NAS device (such as NETGEAR's Stora for home users looking for a simple NAS, or ReadyNAS Duo for more advanced users), the Digital Entertainer Elite will play them directly to your HDTV and home entertainment system, giving you a great viewing and listening experience. And best of all, when using the HDMI port, the Digital Entertainer Elite upconverts your videos to 1080p, so you can enjoy them in high definition.

500 GB Hard Drive for Media Storage
Thanks to its integrated 500 GB hard drive, the Digital Entertainer Elite can even store your digital media. You no longer have to store your movies and photos on your computer's hard drive--the Elite will do that for you, letting you free up space on your computer and allowing you to keep your computer turned off to save energy.

The hard drive also buffers streamed videos, so even if your network performance is inconsistent, you still enjoy glitch-free video. You could also choose to install a larger Hard Drive (standard SATA) for even more storage capability (go to netgear.com/eva9000drive for a hard drive compatibility list).

Play Movies and TV Shows from Hulu, Netflix, and More
The Digital Entertainer Elite also streams videos and feeds from the Internet, letting you browse and play popular movies and TV shows from Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CBS, PlayOn (free trial and special discount included), and more. You can also listen to Internet radio and podcasts and view photos on Flickr.

Works With a Wide Variety of Formats
The Digital Entertainer Elite plays a wide variety of media formats, so you won't have to go through the hassle of finding the right media players to play your different files. In fact, it offers more compatibility than Apple TV, Media Center Extender, Xbox 360, and other competitors. It supports video formats such as AVI, DivX, Xvid, WMV9, MOV, M4V, VOB, MPG, MP1, MP2, MP4, ISO, IFO, MKV, TS, M2TS, and PS. It also supports audio formats such as MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, WMA-Pro, M4A, M4P, Dolby Digital, DTS Passthrough, PCM, LPCM, and WAV (multichannel to 192 KHz). It can even display photos in JPEG, BMP, PNG, and TIFF formats.

Two USB Ports for Connecting iPods, Flash Drives, and Other Storage Devices
For added versatility, the Digital Entertainer Elite sports two easily accessible USB ports for instant access to content via USB flash drives, digital cameras, iPods, or any other USB storage device.

Push 'N' Connect Wireless Technology
NETGEAR's exclusive Push 'N' Connect wireless technology provides an easy way for you to connect to a WPS-secured wireless network. With Push 'N' Connect, you don't need to key in long and complex wireless passwords--just push a button to connect. This technology is dual-band wireless-N compatible, so you get the fastest Wi-Fi connection possible--at speeds of up to 300 Mbps--when coupled with a Wireless-N router.

Wide Assortment of Ports
In addition to the two USB ports and HDMI output, the Digital Entertainer Elite also has an RCA connector for composite video output, RCA connectors for component video output (high-definition support), a digital audio output S/PDIF (coaxial/optical), stereo RCA audio ports, an Ethernet port, and an S-Video port.

Energy Efficient Design
The Digital Entertainer Elite is a NETGEAR Green product, so you know you're getting an device. Its efficient power supply and automatic power-saving mode consume as little as 0.01 watts of power.

The NETGEAR Digital Entertainer Elite EVA9150 is compatible with Windows (including Vista), Macintosh, and Linux computers, and it measures 2.0 x 17 x 10 inches (H x W x D) and weighs 5.56 pounds. It is backed by a one-year warranty.

What's in the Box
Digital Entertainer Elite (EVA9150), four-device universal infrared remote control (2 AA batteries included), power cable, Ethernet cable, RCA stereo-audio/composite-video cable, HDMI cable, installation guide, resource CD, and warranty card.

Related NETGEAR Products to Enhance Your Digital Entertainer Express Experience
NETGEAR Rangemax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WNDR3700) Top-of-the line router, ideal for serious gamers, videophiles, and small businesses demanding high performance Dual-band Wireless-N operates simultaneously on 2.4 and 5.0 GHz frequencies for highest throughput speed and performance 600 Mbps speed, with real throughput of over 350 Mbps		NETGEAR Wireless Adapter for EVA9100 (EVAW111) Wireless adapter for EVA9100 Wireless-N provides ultra-fast speed and performance Push 'N' Connect for easy set-up USB adapter plugs right into port for quick and painless installation
NETGEAR Wireless-N Router (WNR2000) Provides blazing fast Wireless-N networks Is backwards compatible with older Wireless-G networks Has push-button connectivity Automatically configures your router for virtually all ISP connections		NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo 2-Bay (Diskless) Desktop Network Storage (RND2000) Award-winning network attached server streams music, photos and video to network media players without a computer Two disk bays for adding your own drives Allows multiple users share files simultaneously NETGEAR-exclusive X-RAID technology keeps your digital media and files protected
NETGEAR Home Theater Internet Connection Kit (XAVB1004) Converts your home wiring into a high-speed network Turns standard outlets into high-speed, entertainment-grade Internet connections for up to 4 devices Ideal for connecting HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and game consoles to your home network		NETGEAR Stora (MS2110) Centralize all your digital media in a single, secure location Share music and photos with selected friends and family Easily share your photos and movies with your favorite social networking site Stream music to your iPhone or other Web-enabled phone

Product Description

Netgear Eva9150

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good unit that plays almost every format!, April 20, 2009

By 

Phil Baumert (Louisville, KY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: NETGEAR EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite (Electronics)

This is a pretty cool unit. Setup is a breeze and it even came with a DVI cable to hook up to my TV. It also has RCA cables. I have almost 1TB of movies in various formats(.avi .wmv .mpg) and it plays every one. Sometimes I cannot use the skip function if it doesn't fully support the file but it still always plays it. Transferring the files over was a bit harder. It was going to take 7 days to copy 1TB of files over from my server to the hard drive on the unit that I put in it. I even tried a direct cable and it was just as slow. I don't think it does any conversion but it is very slow. When you add a new hard drive in this unit, it formats it with Linux. When I put the drive from the Digital Entertainer in my Windows server it wanted to format the drive. I had to boot into a Linux OS and then I was able to copy the files over very quickly. The software that comes with the unit is pretty nice also. It lets you tag each movie file with information from the Internet Movie Database. It even displays a box cover. This unit also stores and plays music as well as Youtube videos streaming from the Internet. It will connect to your network by wireless or wired, or it can simply be a standalone unit. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars was because of the search feature in the unit. When I want to search for example, the movie "Zoolander", I input the letter "Z" from the remote and instead of filtering every movie that starts with "Z", it lists every movie with the letter "Z" in it like this...

American Zombie
Brazil
Crazy People
Dazed and Confused
Hot Fuzz
Zoolander

It's kind of a convoluted search in my opinion. Other than that, the Digital Entertainer is a top notch unit. It has a very user friendly interface with a nice remote control. It also has 2 USB ports and it can play media directly off of those or the media can be transferred to the hard drive. Netgear did a good job on the Digital Entertainer Elite!

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost perfect..., April 29, 2009

By 

B. Campbell (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: NETGEAR EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite (Electronics)

Let me start by saying I was NOT looking for a Windows Media Center Extender, I was looking for a device that could handle my library of stored media (movies and music), especially it's ability to play DVD images, including the disc menus. For this purpose (provided you have a wireless N or wired network connection) the EVA-9150 is a solid choice, handling virtually any file format you can throw at it without problems. The Digital Entertainer Elite also streams Internet radio stations, and has a nifty RSS feed reading applet built-in.

An application is included that does a decent job of helping you catalog your media library, including tools to help facilitate the creation of tags for media files. My favorite feature in this by far is the ability to go pre-fill a tag with information from IMDB: just go to the page for the movie, click the "fill" button, and all of the information about the movie populates the appropriate fields!

The EVA-9150 includes a 500GB hard drive, but unless your home network is slow and you're having buffering problems, I doubt it would be of much use. If it is, you can swap it out for drives of up to 1TB in size.

Output options are plentiful, including HDMI, component and digital outputs, as well as standard composite and analog audio, so interfacing to virtually any home theater system is realatively easy. Wireless and wired networking are built in and easy to use, and software is included to help you catalog the media on the various devices you may have around your house. Overall, I found everything relatively easy to use for a person familar with PCs and home theater, though the sheer number of options may be intimidating to a novice.

One place where there's room for improvement is the 9150's ability to play various forms of streaming video from the Internet. Netgear will be releasing a firmware upgrade later this year that will allow the EVA-9150 to stream video from providers such as Amazon, Netflix and Hulu using a service called PlayOn that streams these and other services from your PC.

Another sticking point for some users of this unit is it's rather paltry support for Blu-ray file formats. For example, the unit can't read an image of a Blu-ray disk that's stored on hard drive, you can only play back the main movie file, and even then the unit doesn't currently support pass-thru of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD signal to your home theater system. While Netgear is working on these issues, it's unclear as to when a fix might be coming out. (I'd recommend a TivX 7000 for those who want this capability, but their spec sheet sports a similar "to be supported in a future release" quote for TrueHD and DTS-HD support.)

As Netgear adds more capabilities to this unit with each firmware upgrade, they'll have a device that will be harder and harder to beat. For now, they merely have the best way I've found to make media stored on PCs, Macs and network attached storage devices playable on your home theater system.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Blu-Ray Not Fully Supported, March 23, 2010

By 

T. N. Lopas - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: NETGEAR EVA9150 Digital Entertainer Elite (Electronics)

If you are someone who had downloaded hundreds of movies off of the internet or maybe you have a massive home movie collection that you want to be able to play on your TV instead of on your PC then this product might be for you.

I tried over 20 different Blu-Ray discs with none working properly only to find out from Netgear that Blu-Ray is not fully supported. It will only play in the .M2TS format but (like most Blu-Ray audio formats it is in HD) the HD audio feeds will not be played from the player and will only play if you have a separate speaker set up. I thought that that was not such a big deal since I could stream to this device from my PC as well. The buffering feature does not work properly and audio drops out for minutes at a time. I have an N network so it is not a network issue.

This product also claims to play premium content. That is a lie! It will stream premium content from your PC ONLY! All of the content that I have purchased from Amazon On Demand does not buffer properly.

After talking about all of these issues with Netgear and with [...] (the company I purchased through on Amazon) for over a month all came back to me and said "We won't take it back." If you are thinking about purchasing this product I would tread softly. Personally I would purchase an HP mini and hook it up with an HDMI cable to your TV. You are guaranteed to have better results then the EVA1950 and it will operate USB drives with ease. Just a personal thought though.