Smart Home Blog

Yesterday, Seagate released a new firmware of its network HD media player FreeAgent Theater+ HD. The most important change is support of online services such Netflix, YouTube, vTuner and Mediafly. The rest interesting ones are improved MP3 cover art and tagging, ability to create screensavers using personal photos, UTF 16 character support, WMA Pro audio support, motion JPEG support.

The FreeAgent Theater+ HD with new firmware is available at just $129. Which is very reasonable price for player with supporting of Full HD, online services and offering dock for external HDDs. Existing owners of the FreeAgent Theater+ HD will able to update firmware via Internet or from USB memory stick.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Savant – well-known producer of commercials smarthome systems, demonstrated its new application for Apple iPad. The application turns iPad into portable touchscreen control panel and offers a whole control under the system – lighting, climate, entertainment area, security and surveillance. It has an user friendly and nice looking GUI. Moreover, using Rosie Streamer consumer will able to strim video content directly to the iPad turned on it into portable media player.

Taking into account that the cheapest iPad version costs $499 the new Apple product looks very attractive for smarthome systems owners. Especially when they offer applications for that.

ElectronicHouse offers an useful roundup of 32 iPhone Apps to Control Your Home. It might be useful for iPhone owners or smarthome system users. Because iPhone looks a perfect solution for portable control panel for your system. Moreover, it allows to control the system even from another country using WiFi or 3G connection. Great device and great roundup!

Yesterday Boxee development team announced a new update of current beta version. It includes a new file identification indicator to see how many files Boxee is scanning, has identified, and doesn’t recognize in your media library, possibility to manually set proper type for any video file, Facebook & Twitter is added to the Boxee feed, better RSS management. Sure there is a lot of bug fixes in that update which bring closer the day when the stable Boxee version will be released.

The same day Boxee added a new online video service – NHL GameCenter LIVE. Now Boxee uses and NHL GameCenter LIVE subscribers may enjoy great Hockey games & fights in HD on their Boxee HTPCs.

It’s good to see that Boxee is growing day by day. Still waiting Boxee Box from D-Link.

Seagate and Paramount Pictures recently announced their agreement to pre-load a selection of 500GB FreeAgent Goâ„¢ ultra-portable hard drives with Paramount movies. It’ll be 20 movies. It isn’t so much but as a first step it’s very very clever decision. It’s also good news because consumers and producers are ready for digital media libraries for a long time. But film companies are too stiff and decision of Paramount Pictures promises that the rest big movie producers will also partner with Seagate, Western Digital or some other producer of HDD to offer their pre-loaded movies on HDDs.

Personally I like that solution and I think it’s much better then DVD or Blu-ray. Sure when Internet channels will have enough power to deliver SD or HD content everywhere online media libraries will dominate. But now distribution of media content on the external HDD is the most appropriate way to deliver movies to the consumer.