Smart Home Blog

I already wrote about Seagate’s FreeAgent Theater – media player with dock for FreeAgent Go portable HDD. It looked very attractive. Especially for non-geek people who don’t want to spend their time to setup Popcorn Hour or HTPC. But it had one big disadvantage – missed HDMI output.

It took 9 monthes to produce improved version of FreeAgent Theater. FreeAgent Theater+ has not only HDMI output but Ethernet port and ability to wireless connection to the LAN using USB WiFi adapter. Sure it supports all known media formats and containers as many networked media players as well as 1080p HD video, DTS 2.0 + Digital Out or Dolby Digital technology. The player for consumers offers a simple and intuitive user interface.

The Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ is already available at $149.99. The bundle player plus 500Gb FreeAgent Go costs $289.99. The FreeAgent Theater+ Wireless Adapter is expected to be available in October as a separate accessory through Seagate.com for $69.99.

Taking into account the price, offered functionality and the original idea for storage FreeAgent Theater+ can be success competitor for networked media players on the market.

Another new product from Seagate is FreeAgent DockStar. It’s a dock-station for FreeAgent Go portable HDD with Pogoplug NAS capabilities. For the $99 you can get FreeAgent DockStar plus one year of Pogoplug remote access and sharing service ($29). Sure you may use original Pogoplug device to share HDD content in the local network. But FreeAgent DockStar is more suitable for FreeAgent Go owners. And it has two USB ports more.

[via eHomeUpgrade/eHomeUpgrade]

Seagate announced on CES 2009 its new product – FreeAgent Theater. It contains two parts – media player with dock for FreeAgent Go portable hard drive and dock to connect disk to PC.

Media player allows to playback media content from hard drive directly to TV using user friendly interface. It supports video – MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI/DivX /Xvid), subtles – SAMI(smi), SRT and SUB, audio – MP3, AC3 (5.1 audio – Dolby® Digital) WMA, WAV, OGG. Video resoluons can be NTSC 480i/480p; PAL 576i/576p and it supports video (HD and upscaling) up to 720p/1080i.

FreeAgent Theater can be connected to the TV using composite, component or S-Video outputs (HDMI is missed and it’s a biggest disadvantage of the device IMHO). Audio can be passed via stereo or co-axil S/PDIF.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater is very good solution for all how use FreeAgent Go HDDs to keep videos, music and photos. Nice design, user friendly software and remote control will make using that device easy for all family members.

It’ll be available on February with price ~ $220 including 500GB HDD.