Netgear Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 review

The Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 is Netgear's answer to the Apple TV.

It's not quite as sleek or compact as Apple's offering, but it certainly has a few things that make it a bit more attractive. It might be quicker to list the video outputs the EVA8000 doesn't have rather than the ones it does, but for the sake of clarity there's HDMI, Scart, composite video, component video and S-video support. Audiophiles shouldn't be disappointed, either, with standard phono sockets and both optical and coaxial digital connections. There's an Ethernet port and wireless 802.11g, as well as two USB ports for attaching a hard disk or iPod. In short, you would have a hard time finding a television that the Digital Entertainer doesn't support.

The Digital Entertainer also supports 10 video formats, 11 audio formats and its maximum resolution is 1080p. It can access RSS feeds and display slideshows from Flickr. It even tells you what the weather is like where you live.

Unfortunately, some of the aspects of the Digital Entertainer are PC only, such as the YouTube video download and PVR integration. Nevertheless, with Elgato's EyeTV software and EyeConnect UPnP server you can, in a round about way, add television content.

The software isn't as user friendly as some of the others in this Labs test, and it seemed to take an age to scan after the initial setup. Overall, it's usable once you've spent a little time getting to know it. The software had a few glitches as well, with the unit acting erratically at times. Image quality is very good and even the Scart connections gave good, crisp images.

If Netgear went the whole hog and wrote its own software to bring the PC-only applications to the Mac the EVA8000 would be the perfect media-streaming device. Even so, with the third party solutions, the Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 is a worthy competitor to the Apple TV.