Smart Home Blog

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.