Company: Seagate
Product : FreeAgent Theater with 500 GB FreeAgent Go HD
Price: $279

Convenience Rating: 3.8 stars
Video Quality: 4.8 stars
Appearance: 4.5 stars
Re-use/Replay Value: 3 stars

Overall Rating: 4 stars

After you take photos from your digital camera and videos from your camcorder, where does it all go?  Most people dump their photos in iPhoto if they have a Mac, or some folder if they have a pc.  For their videos, it is basically the same.  While you can edit your videos and make it look good, there really isn’t any enjoyment in watching your videos & slideshows if you have to sit in the office like a bunch of geeks to watch your media on a tiny computer screen.  Thankfully, Seagate looks to change all that as smooth as possible with its FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player.  It is basically a high-definition media player that will allow you to play all your media on your Seagate portable hard drives on a monitor or television.

The device alone is $129, but you can buy models that also come with a  250GB or 500GB FreeAgent Go portable hard drive for $229 and $279, respectively. The player is extremely easy to set up and offers a simple way to move content to a big screen. But I found 3 drawbacks: the lack of AAC, WMV, and DRM support.  These 3 formats is what 40-50% of my media is preserved on, which made it a little frustrating for me to get my favorite content up onto the big screen.

Appearance

My unit came with a silver/white 500 GB drive which looked great on the attractive FreeAgent Theater, which sports a glossy, black lid which draws plenty of fingerprints and smudges.  It basically has all the qualities of the black back of the iPhone 3G.  The front face contains power, navigation, and menu buttons, as well as keys for playing, pausing, and stopping content.

The FreeAgent Theater’s front bezel also has an infrared receiver (for use with the included remote control), an eject button to eject the drive, and a USB port for attaching external devices such as a digital cameras, etc. to the unit.

The back of the FreeAgent Theater sports numerous ports for connecting the device to a monitor or TV: composite, S-Video, component, and coaxial. But the weirdest thing is that it lacks an HDMI port, which is a strange since Seagate boasts that the box can output up to 1080i resolution and supports Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. There’s also a reset button, and of course, a port for power.

Setup & User Interface

Setup was easy. I installed the included software onto my PC notebook, connected the portable drive using the included USB dock, and clicked the MediaSync button to copy media from the PC to the drive. After that process was done, I removed the drive from the dock and slid it into the FreeAgent Theater.  The unit is pretty small ( 7.2 x 7.0 x 1.2-inch ), and weights 1.2 pounds (well, 1.6 pounds if the hard drive is in the unit).

I connected the FreeAgent Theater into my friends 32-inch Samsung HDTV using the component and audio cables; composite cables are the only ones included within the package. The FreeAgent Theater’s remote wasn’t as great as I expected; I had to point the device directly at the IR port.  Also, some of the buttons were positioned too closely together, resulting in many accidental button presses.

The menu screen took 5 seconds to appear on the screen after powering up the FreeAgent Theater, and the layout was simple to navigate. You can use the remote to scroll through the different categories (Music, Video, Photo) and then select a file through the list to open it. Kind of reminds me of the Finder of Windows Explorer window.  There wasn’t any lag when moving from file to file, but opening photos or video typically took 3 to 4 seconds. It wasn’t to bad, but still.

Audio/Video Quality

The FreeAgent Theater supports a wide array of file formats and codecs, including MP3, AC3, WMA, WAV, OGG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI, DivX, Xvid), and JPEG. The FreeAgent Theater does not support AAC files, which means it can’t play files from the iTunes Store (where most my media is stored) nor WMV video files. In addition, files that are protected by DRM — such as content like iTunes HD Movies & TV shows — aren’t supported.

I played the movie “Get Smart”(converted into AVI), and  play back was smooth on the big screen. I then watched a movie that I recorded with my Pure Digital Flip UltraHD camcorder that was edited & converted into AVI using iMovie, which also played back flawlessly. Music sounded loud and crisp through the speakers of my friends Samsung television, photos looked good on the big screen, too, and we were able to easily create slideshows accompanied by music by selecting a tune and then returning to a photo folder.

Bottom Line

The $279 Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player is a good device for average consumers who want to view their PC’s content on a big screen. However,  the FreeAgent Theater lacks AAC, WMV, and DRM compatibility. If those drawbacks don’t affect you, the Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player will be a welcome addition to your entertainment setup, and hey, you can still use the 500 GB hard drive that comes bundled with it just as an ordinary external drive.

Note: The FreeAgent Theater currently only works for PC’s.