so today we'll be having a look at yet another Network media player we have the
Seagate free agent theater plus this is an HD Media Player it is fully 1080p
ready basically it allows you to access content from your home network much like
a lot of these other network media accessories so first of all you've got
your list of what's in the box which we'll be showing you soon enough so there's no need to read that you've got
minimum system requirements which are very very conservative 256 Megs RAM is
pretty much it and a USB port okay so that's not too bad it's got these
supported formats which does include rmvb as well as MKV so some of the
pretty important ones are there subtitle support and resolutions up to 1080p uh
let me see you can do jpeg photos if you wanted to do that and it supports both
pal and ntsc so let's get this thing
open and yeah here we go so first of all we take off the plastic yeah oh yeah one
of the cool features while I'm unboxing this thing if I could just get the
plastic started maybe something sharp would be helpful is actually the ability
to dock a Seagate external hard drive
into the front of it so where a lot of these media players have support for a
USB hard drive uh on the outside or for
an internal hard drive like the popcorn hour this one actually supports the use
of an external hard drive internally if
you catch my drift so let's take this open and I'll show you exactly what I
mean first of all you're going to find a quick start guide which based on how
stiff it is also includes a CD so we'll see what it says the CD is for in just a
moment so here's your quick start guide they want you
to check and make sure you have everything connect an HDMI connection or
something else connect to Ethernet and plug in the power at this point you can
also insert a free agent go hard drive so that's a 2 and 1/2 in external hard
drive and take advantage of that or you can use an external USB port to any
Drive enclosure here's some instructions for how to use the media sync software
and the remote control okay so here's your free agent theater
Plus HD Media Player solution this is what you need to install on the server
computer then you've got your warranty information okay and then you have
updated oh they're telling you you want to update your firmware as frequently as
possible but make sure that you get the latest from seates website okay here we
go so it's a little bit bigger than you know what let's do the accessories first
actually I changed my mind okay first you got your power brick pretty standard
thing it comes with a plug on one end and a different front plug on the other
end okay that's good then you've got a
composite cable okay it looks like about a 6t cable 3ot probably and then you
have a component video cable okay that was great and oh it comes with oh no it
doesn't come with an HDMI cable so that is a bit of a small knock against it but
it does come with kind of a fancy looking Ethernet cable with metal on the
sides okay so there's an Ethernet cable and two AAA batteries for the remote
actually the remote can make or break these devices so this is not nearly as
advanced a remote as something like the popcorn hours but it's a little bit
better than what comes with the wdtv live so you just have kind of your basic
functionality uh it's a little on the big side I guess considering the buttons
looks like there's a lot of empty space but that's going to give you pretty much
what you need to do to navigate the menus play stop forward rewind mute Etc
okay so now let's have a look at the unit itself oh something that uh we
should probably mention is you can see that this packaging is green it is well
not green it's brown but it's recycled recycled material so uh they are saving
the environment one package at a time so let's take the plastic off the top it
doesn't come off in one piece cuz you can see here on the right that's the
hatch for installing aha a 2 and 1/2 in drive so
you can see it's just a USB connection at the back so that both Powers the
drive and provides your data transfer and you can remove or put on this cover
as needed it's quite a leak looking unit is quite a bit bigger than the wdtv live
but I really like the front of it it's very clean looking you basically got one
USB port and one is that a power switch
I think it's a power switch I can't tell it doesn't seem to have much of a switchy feel to it but that'll be in the
instructions one way or another okay so there's your AV out there is your
component out optical audio HDMI LAN USB
and power there's a hard reset switch on the back so that pretty much covers our
unboxing of the Tate free agent feeder
Plus