The NETGEAR EVA8000 Digital Entertainer is a standalone unit designed to stream various types of audio and video content from your PC to your TV. It's similar to a DVR, except that it doesn't have a tuner card built into it. NETGEAR offers two models of their EVA Digital Entertainers: the EVA700, which only streams SD content, and the EVA8000 which is their high-end model, capable of streaming content in HD format.

When I first encountered the EVA8000 (from here on out referred to as EVA because it becomes tedious having to type 8000 all the time), I wondered aloud, “Why?” After all I’m the happy owner of a TiVo and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I’d want a DVR sans the tuner.

After a week of playing around with it, real-world style in my living room—by no means the exhaustive and scientific method you’d find in a lab—I’ve come to understand, if not respect, most of the designs and philosophies behind the EVA.

Opening the Box

The first thing I did, of course, was to open it up to see what sorts of accoutrements were included with the unit. I was happy to see that it came with just about everything I’d need to connect it to my TV[1], except for an HDMI cable; those things are expensive, and I don’t really need it to get 720p or 1080i resolution out of my TV anyhow. I did have one beef with it right away though: the manual said that it came with an S-Video and a composite A/V cable when, in fact, what I actually got was a component video and a composite A/V. Hilarity ensued for a few minutes while I searched for the non-existent S-Video cable.

After that, I set the manual and accompanying CD aside; it should be easy enough to figure out a piece of hardware like this without some tech writer from India telling me how to make it go. I’m of the philosophy that if a piece of hardware doesn’t go in a computer, it shouldn’t need extra software to make it work right.

Three out of four cats approved of the empty box.

Setup

I’m a Linux convert, and have been since the mid 90’s. I’m not so rabid as having drunk the Kool Aid©, but I firmly believe that if you’re going to use GNU software as an ingredient of the secret sauce for a piece of consumer hardware—as implied by the included leaflet with the GNU General Public License—you should at least make it work with Linux/Unix as well as it does with Microsoft Windows. If you don’t, that’s just plain rude, man.

Noticing the antennae, I decided that I’d be connecting to my home network wirelessly; after connecting the box to my TV, I fired it up.

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First Impressions

My TV screen had a smiling empty head with media shooting out of it, telling me to please wait. Eventually EVA asked me my language preferences—English, if you haven’t guessed by now— and a test to make sure I was getting sound.

I chose “Custom setup” because, well I’m a nerd, and I wanted to see what I had for choices other than accessing stuff from Windows computers (all my mp3’s and video are on my ancient Linux box in the basement and are shared via Samba).

Next came my Video mode choice; I selected 720p. It then wanted me to enter a room name, implying that I should be in possession of multiple units, all working in synchronization to keep me saturated in media no matter where I walk in my house.

I chose “Living Room,” and after setting up my network, I entered my ZIP code.

Then came the first hiccup. In a very difficult to parse sentence, it told me to use the software on the included CD on the computer where I had my media files; it being a Linux box, I very well couldn’t do that, or could I?

The only other option it gave for me was to “Press ‘Home’ on the remote control to abort (not recommended).” What was I aborting? Your guess is as good as mine because it says the same thing whether I’m playing the Linux game or going the recommended Windows route.

Annoyed now, because I wasn’t sure if I was missing out on something cool (it turns out that I wasn’t, it was just a poor option for a user interface), I looked for a button labeled “Home;” there wasn’t one, so I chose the button with the little picture of a house.

That took me to a screen that promised to scan for network shares if I so desired.

I chose “Yes.” This was another annoyance, because this unit—being a device whose sole purpose in life is to stream media from remote places on my home network—should have only informed me that was what it was going to do. What was I going to do, say, “No, I just want a pretty blue screen that does nothing!”

After a touch and go issue with the way I’d set up my Samba server—it seems that EVA wants to be able to not only read remote shares, but also requires write access to one of them—I finally coaxed EVA into finding my music/video share downstairs.

Like most modern remotes, it has the up/down left/right arrow buttons. "Left" to most people means “back out” or “cancel,” but not, apparently, in NETGEAR labs where “left” apparently means “apply changes.”

The EVA can also act as a DVR. Unfortunately, I don’t own a PC with a tuner card, so testing of EVA’s DVR functionality was lost to me.

After selecting my cable provider, I finally made it to the main screen, which showed me my current weather conditions.

Ease of Use

After the iffy set-up, the user interface turned out to be pretty straight forward and consistent. It poked through my remote Samba shares and found all of my MP3s, plus some mpegs that had been stashed away. Had I been using Windows, all I’d have had to do was open up Properties on, say, “My Video” or “My Music,” shared it to the local network, and EVA would have found any media in those folders.

Now that I had everything working nicely, I went to Apple.com and downloaded a whole mess of high definition movie trailers. I bombarded EVA with them, trying to make her choke[2]. The only thing that really threw EVA for a loop was the ‘300’ trailer that I'd downloaded in 1080p. Either my TV couldn’t handle it, and/or there wasn’t sufficient bandwidth in my network and video connectors. It was able to deal with all the 720p trailers I streamed to it, but pausing, rewinding, or fast forwarding videos proved problematic because of bandwidth and streaming issues.

Noticing the USB port on the front, I dropped a trailer onto a thumb drive. EVA quickly found the USB drive and added the video file to the play list. Soon, my TV was screaming “THIS . . . IS . . . SPARTA!!!” at me.

Being the nerd that I am, I navigated my way through the “More...” menu, which eventually brought me to the System Information. Noticing EVA’s IP address, I pointed Firefox to the address and, low and behold, I found a web interface that was much nicer to use than the remote control. This is a terrific feature. I can sit on the couch and control my entire home media experience from my laptop.

Ah, yes, the remote. The remote is, to be diplomatic, less than ideal, and is a real weakness. TiVo, for example, comes with an universal remote that feels good in my hand; the buttons are well spaced out so you’re not constantly hitting the wrong one—unlike EVA’s remote. For a machine that’s supposed to act like the control center of a DVR, it’s a bad idea to skimp on the remote; it’s your interface to the TV, and needs to Just Work.

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Going Back and Reading the Directions

One of the things I noticed when I flipped through the manual (and poked around in the menus) was that EVA could connect to YouTube and play videos from the site. Same deal with the picture site Flickr, and internet radio. The problem is that you have to have the included software to play YouTube videos. This isn't the case with Flickr or any of the internet radio stations, but when I tried to connect to the Michigan Radio NPR stream (they stream it as either Real or MP3) there was no joy in Mudville.

Hmm. While the inclusion of web phenomena like YouTube and Flickr is a nifty gee whiz feature, I wonder if perhaps they could’ve included those extras as downloadable add-ons rather than being hardwired into the experience.

Installing Software: Bittorrent, YouTube, and Radio, Oh My!

Begrudgingly, I booted my laptop into Windows and installed the Digital Entertainer's software. I needed to see what I was missing out on.

The main Digital Entertainer software that's included on the CD-ROM sits in the Windows tray (or, as it turns out, KDE’s system tray via Wine, but this functionality was severely limited). The control program sits in the tray and allows EVA to stream video from YouTube to the TV. This is really cool, but you can only stand to watch so many home videos of teenagers doing stupid things with fireworks, or of peoples’ cute pets.

Also included on the CD is a BitTorrent client. In theory it was a great idea, but in practice? It's not so great. The problem? Microsoft Windows' DRM, or Digital Rights Management protection. I thought I’d give BitTorrent a whirl. The theory is that you pay $1.99 to legally download a television show to your computer’s hard drive, and then share it to EVA. EVA then streams the content to your high-def screen.

In practice it didn’t work. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get EVA to serve it up to my TV; it kept giving me a “Media is protected - unable to play” message.

I think this is complete crap. I paid for that TV show, and I should be able to do whatever I want short of sharing it with 1,000,000 of my closest friends via Gnutella or somesuch. This is a very frustrating situation because without a high-definition pipe coming into my house via my local cable provider, that would be the only way to get HD media to my TV.

Including BitTorrent without being able to either: a) strip out the DRM, or b) to stream what I’ve downloaded. This lack of functionality will sent people into fits of swearing frustration. How do I know this? I created new swear-words while trying to figure out how to get the episode of My Name is Earl that I'd purchased from my PC to my TV. I eventually had to give up, admit defeat, and realize that the $1.99 was gone forever.

Stuff I Wasn’t Able To Test

It would have been nice to be able to test the integration with Windows Media Center, but I didn’t have access to such a box. From what I can tell, NETGEAR charges you for access to local television listings, and I wasn't interested in paying for that because I get this service through TiVo.

Testing the EVA's compatibility with MovieLink was also not an option for me. It requires Internet Explorer, which I lack.

Final Thoughts

I like the EVA 8000, and am enjoying playing with the unit, but with some caveats:

• The remote is kind of sucky, and
• The feature that allows multiple EVAs to work in sync is, in theory, nice, but at $350 per unit it’s a feature that could get expensive real fast.

The user interface (UI), after pounding on it for a week, became second nature.

It's a neat device, and there are plenty of people out there who will love it. Like I mentioned at the top, it’s a great idea: find the media on your network and serve it up to your TV. For someone like me, it just isn’t practical, especially when you have to deal with nonsense like DRM. Once the DRM issues are worked out, I'd like to try it again and see if I have a better experience.