Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD

by Netgear

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 19.9 x 15.1 x 4.3 inches ; 4.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000NNBK9O
• Item model number: EVA8000-100NAS
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #63 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Networking Products > Network Transceivers
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 7, 2004

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The NETGEAR EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD offers: An easy way to connect your home theater with your home network. Playback of video and music stored on your computer on your home theater. Support for 1080p HD video resolution. A built-in USB port for connecting iPods, digital cameras, and other devices. Support for 802.11g wireless networks.

The NETGEAR EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD connects your TV and home entertainment system to your computer network, letting you enjoy the HD videos, music, and photos from your PC on your HDTV and high-quality speakers.

The EVA8000 supports HD video up to 1080p. View larger. View Rear.

Easy Setup and Strong Security
The EVA8000 plugs into your home theater system with a variety of outputs including RCA, S-Video, Digital Coaxial/SPDIF audio, HD component video, and HDMI for resolution up to 1080p. The Digital Entertainer HD supports both 802.11g wireless for up to 54 Mbps speeds, as well as wired connections via an 10/100 Mbps RJ-45 jack. Note that in order to connect the device to your home network with sufficient bandwidth to stream your HD videos, you will need to use the wired connection. Dual 2 dBi antennas are built-in for better wireless reception.

In addition to the hard drive of your PC, the EVA8000 also works seamlessly with the NETGEAR SC101 storage device (sold separately). There is also a USB 2.0 port, letting you play files saved on an iPod, USB thumb drive, USB disk, or digital camera.

The Digital Entertainer boasts hardware-based WEP 40/64-bit and 128-bit encryption and WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK for enhanced security.

Support for Digital Media File Formats
The Digital Entertainer can handle a large variety of digital media file formats. Compatible audio formats include: MP3 (up to 320 Kbps or VBR), WAV, WMA (up to 192 Kbps or VBR), M3U, and AAC. Compatible video formats include: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, WMV (up to 1080p), and Xvid. Compatible photo formats include: JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, and GIF.

If you have a TV tuner card (not included) installed on your PC, the EVA8000 will let you schedule recordings and pause and rewind live TV, providing an easy interface to your DVR. If you purchase two or more Digital Entertainer HDs and have them in different rooms, you can synchronize music throughout the house for parties, and you can keep watching a video moving from one room to another by pausing it in one room and unpausing it in another.

An included remote control lets you control all the media files on your home network, as well as from popular internet sites, from the comfort of your couch. You can also access your desktop and some applications such as email. The NETGEAR EVA8000 Digital Entertainer is backed by a 1-year warranty.

What's in the Box
EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD, infrared remote control (2 AA batteries included), power cable, Ethernet cable, component video cable, installation guide, resource CD, and warranty/support information card.

Product Description

Now you can access and enjoy your digital entertainment easily on your TV and HDTV with NETGEAR’s Digital Entertainer HD(model number EVA8000) streams HD videos, music, Internet radio and digital photos from your home PC and storage devices to your HDTV, wirelessly. The EVA8000 automatically finds all the digital media files on your home network and organizes them into an easily accessible library. Setup is easy using an on screen TV wizard and the EVA8000 delivers HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) for HD video resolution up to 1080i.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good potential, but not for non-technical users, May 15, 2007

By 

AlexL (Boston, United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD (Personal Computers)

I really like this device, it's got great potential. However I should note that this unit is for techical users - not-technical users will probably be better off with iTV.

This box plays a lot more formats and has a lot more features - but it compromises on ease of use. If you are the kind of person that likes to tinker - this is definitely a good fit for you. Make sure that 1st thing you do after plugging it in (which was really quick and painless) is register on NetGear forums and request access to beta firmware.

Beta firmware addresses a lot of stability issues of original firmware and adds many good useful features. And access to beta firmware is free, also you can roll back to original one if you'd like at any time.

So far it played anything I tried (about 5-6 different formats). Firmware is being actively worked on, developers are active on the forums and actually listen to feature requests.

Overall I'm very happy with my EVA8000, it does everything I need at a fraction of a cost of Media Center PC.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not ready for Prime Time, May 6, 2007

By 

A. C. Eberhardt "Aceface3" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD (Personal Computers)

This product needs some software and firmware upgrades to make it a viable media center. Specifically the UI structure still seems to be in Beta mode. Setup was painless (altho if you are VISTA OS make sure you upgrade the firmware), Internet Radio worked well and playing AVI & WMV files worked well, it could not find my iTunes playlists either. But the biggest bust is the confused state of the UI which makes this product unusable (especially for VOB files). Tech Support was from abroad and was awful, they're not familiar with the product and the techy was shooting from the hip.
Looks like i'm going back to my XBOX360 as my media center.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars could do much more, December 1, 2007

By 

Gm (Arlington, MA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Netgear EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD (Personal Computers)

The main things I use this device for are:
1) playback of ripped DVDs
2) playback of high-definition home videos

I haven't owned a cd player in over five years since I started ripping my music cd's and playing them back through mp3 players and audio streamers. Now that I can purchase music online, physical discs are quickly becoming obsolete for me as well. My hope was that with this video streamer, I would be able to do with my DVD collection what I did with my CD collection: box it up and put it into storage. This device almost lets me do that, but with some pretty disappointing limitations.

DVD Playback
First of all, this device does play back unencrypted DVD's (IFO files). This is an essential feature for a video server in my opinion, yet mysteriously this support is not advertised in the product description.

Playback of DVD's looks perfect. If you've ripped a DVD to a hard drive, you can play it back through the EVA8000 on your HDTV and it will look awesome. As an added bonus, the EVA8000 has no moving parts so you will not hear any sound from it; no fans, no spinning motors, nothing. The problems with playing back DVD's are:
1) The EVA8000 does not bookmark where you left off. If you stop watching a movie halfway through, you'll have to scan back through the movie to pick up where you left off. This is a problem even if you just stop playback without turning off the device.
2) The EVA8000 does not support menus, subtitles, or multiple angles. You can skip from chapter to chapter, but without a menu giving you a description of each chapter it can be very difficult to navigate a disc. If you want to watch a foreign film and need subtitles, you are out of luck.
3) Fast forward only works at one speed: very slow. It's not much faster than regular playback speed.
4) Occasionally the device will freeze up. This is very rare, but it does occasionally happen for no apparent reason. Unplugging and plugging the device back in clears it up.

High Definition Playback
First let me say that if you playback a high definition video through the EVA8000, it looks perfect. I have a high end high definition camcorder that I use Sony Vegas to convert my recordings to HD wmv files with. I can use the EVA8000 to select my home videos for instant playback, which is extremely convenient. No more hooking up the camcorder to the tv and scanning through tapes.

The limitations of the HD playback are extremely disappointing however.
1) The only format that I found the EVA8000 could play back is high definition wmv.
2) The EVA8000 will not play back ripped Blu-Ray or HD DVD discs.

Other Notes
I have never used the youtube feature of this device. Adding support for youtube to a high definition playback device is like adding a cassette player to your iPod.

I run this device on a gigabit ethernet connection, and have no idea how well it would play back using its wireless connection.

The user interface of the EVA8000 is lousy. I had hoped that the rest of my family would find this to be a simple alternative to the DVD player, but its not. Organization of the files is a mess, and there is no simple way to change that.

Rescanning my media library is not easy. I cannot use the auto rescan feature, because it always kicks on in the evening when I am most likely to be using the device. When a rescan is in progress, playback essentially stops. The rescan in my case takes up to an hour to complete. I have to rescan manually when I know I'm done using the device for the evening.

In summary, this device is extremely disappointing to me in several ways yet I still use it very frequently. I often wonder who Netgear was targeting with this device, as it seems to have the features advanced users would want and yet it implements advanced features so poorly. Sadly, there has not been a firmware update since July 2007 and I'm afraid the EVA8000 is not going to be seeing any improvements. I was considering giving this product a 2 or 3 star rating, but based on the fact that I do think it is good for home video playback and does so with great quality I'm giving it a generous 4 star rating.