I was totally pumped to pull the NETGEAR Digital Entertainer (commonly called an "EVA" because the manufacturer code is the "EVA700") out of the box. I've had a television in the basement for years, on which I watch my favorite Sci-Fi (think Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5) while I work out. And for years, I've been thinking about what it would take to wire that TV up to the mountain of digital media I have stored on my network. Specifically, I have an Infrant ReadyNAS with about 600 GB of movies, music and pictures on it. So, when I read about the Digital Entertainer's ability to pull digital media from all over the house and pipe it to my plain-old, regular TV, I was all over that!

My very first impression of the EVA700 was a friend saying that he couldn't get it setup, so I was very interested to sink my teeth into it. I'm a fairly technical guy - not too hardcore - so I figured it'd be something I could tackle. I went into it hoping to prove my friend wrong, and I did.

I pulled the EVA700 out of the box, slapped it together in a matter of a minute or so... Power cable, check. Network cable, check. Used composite A/V through my tuner (don't exactly need 1080p when I'm working out), turned everything on, switched my receiver from DVD to Video1, and ... Nothing. Blue empty screen. What the heck!? Was my friend right? So, I found myself facing every man's common challenge - the need to read the manual.

The manual made it pretty clear that I should be seeing a beautiful welcome screen right about now, so I pulled the inputs from the TV, and hooked the EVA straight to it via composite to troubleshoot. Voila! There was the welcome screen I'd been promised (in all it's 320x240 glory). But since I couldn't stand the thought of having to switch back and forth between video sources on the TV *in addition* to fiddling with all the other remotes, I played with it until I realized that in order for my s-video cable from the receiver to the TV to pick up the EVA, I had to use s-video from the EVA to the receiver as well. Done. And the welcome screen looks beautiful.

The Digital Entertainer immediately detected my network, grabbed an IP address, and said that it had found a ViiV-enabled machine to play with. I found this odd, since I have no such machine (one with Intel ViiV technology), but I went with it and clicked "okay". The very next screen showed my ReadyNAS (even called it by the name I'd assigned it), and gave me the option to browse it or internet radio for digital media. Literally, one click of the remote, and I was up and running. No software installed anywhere. One quick reference to the manual. Couldn't have been simpler.

So I was off! Using the remote, I clicked on my NAS, browsed the directories on it like I would on a PC, selected an AVI file I'd downloaded (via BitTorrent), and watched an old episode of Numb3rs. One of the easiest things I've ever done with one of my gadgets.

I played with the wireless networking options, and they were a little more complicated. But the most basic, out of the box, wired setup was a breeze. Also took me a second to realize that I had to press stop before I could get out of a video that was playing and get back to browsing. (Guess I'm spoiled by the Windows Media Center picture-in-a-picture concept.)

Want music? Works just like expected.

Want pictures? If you select a picture, it views it. If you press play in a folder full of music, it gives you a slideshow. No way to fast forward and takes a second or two to load each image, but other than that, I though it did great.

Want internet radio? A 60 day free trial comes with the Digital Entertainer, and behaved exactly as I would have expected it to. The interface was particularly good here, where I was able to search (not crazy about the cell-phone-like numeric pad on the remote for entering letters, though), browse by genre, etc.

So, first off, my friend was wrong. How he couldn't get the thing setup, I have no idea. Beyond that, my first hands-on impression was excellent. The EVA700 retails for about $180 online. To be able to slap that down, open the box, and in 5 minutes have all my media available to me on any TV in the house (with no additional PC in the mix, since I'm using my ReadyNAS for content storage), is phenomenal. Workouts just got that much more enjoyable!