Netgear EVA8000 network media player reviewed

Review The EVA8000 was a high-endproduct when it was announced, bundling HDMI with 1080P HD playback.But the video encoding world moves quickly. It may have been suitablewhen HD standards were emerging, but a few months later the situationlooks decidedly different.
H.264 has emerged as the HD codec of choice, although you'll alsofind material encoded with Microsoft's VC1 codec out there as well.Both are used on HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. MPEG 2 is still hanging inthere, but for HD material it's really not up to the job.

Netgear EVA8000: no MKV support - yet

Although the EVA8000 supports a vast array of codecs, includingH.264, VC1, WMV, Xvid, Divx and WMV, it's in containers where theshipping model falls short. A container format is simply a filestructure for bundling up encoded audio and video. AVI is probably thebest known, but others include WMV, MPEG 4 and QuickTime. The containerformat doesn't dictate which codec is used, so you can have an AVI thatcontains video encoded in Divx and another AVI with video compressed inMPEG 2, for example.
As HD content has become more widely available, Matroska - aka MKV -has emerged as one of the most in-demand container formats. Matroskahas been around since 2002 and is open source, so it can be used byanyone and isn't tied to any restrictive licensing agreements.

Out of the box, the EVA8000 doesn't support MKV files - you can'teven see them when browsing your network because of the way the machineindexes files. However, although the last official firmware for thedevice, version 1.2.20, was released on 31 July, Netgear has in themeantime been actively developing a firmware update that does supportMKV, along with numerous other features and fixes.
We didn't want to review the EVA8000 until support for this important format was present.

However, there is an area where you can't fault the EVA8000: codecsupport. With the beta firmware installed you can pretty much throw anyfile generally available at it and it'll be able to produce a picture.For a full rundown of what it can support, take a look at the tablebelow. It shows the results of testing the player with the majority offormats you're currently likely to encounter. In the table, Y means thefile played back without a hitch, P indicates that the EVA8000 couldplay the file but not without dropping frames, and N means that filewouldn't play at all.

EVA800 Codec Support

Highest bit-rate in Mb/s

Hardware wise, the EVA8000 has pretty much everything you'd want.There are HDMI and component-video ports for high-def output plus co-axand optical digital audio out for surround sound. There's a networkport and built-in wireless, plus two USB ports - one at the front andone at the back - for hooking up external storage.
The device will function happily as a standalone unit, although theset-up routine does try and push you to install the accompanying PCapplication to help it out. You'll also need to set up the PC side ofthings if you want to watch YouTube videos directly from the box - butwatching squished, blocky, lo-res YouTube on a hi-def display is such ahorrific experience you're unlikely to miss this functionality if youskip the PC install.
One irksome thing about the EVA8000 is the way it handles mediafiles. It tries to index and organise everything for you, which wouldbe acceptable if it wasn't such a time-consuming process. Scanning a500GB network drive for content took over an hour.
Every time you add any addition files, you need to perform whatNetgear terms a 'quick scan' - this can take anything up to 15 minutes.This could all be forgiven if you could simply browse the directorystructure on attached drives manually, but even with folder browsingturned on you still can only see files that have been indexed.

Verdict
Netgear's EVA8000 really should be a fantastic media player, but itcurrently falls flat thanks to two issues. The major clanger is itslack of high bit-rate content support. There's a small chance that thiscould be rectified in future firmware updates, but it's unlikely toimprove drastically as it's probably down to the amount of physicalbuffer memory available.
The second big problem is the way it handles file indexing, which istime-consuming. However, provided you keep its index up to date anddon't throw any high bit-rate files at it, it's a great little player.Given Netgear's commitment so far to regularly-issued firmware updates,there's a chance the problems could be fixed in the future.