 "NETGEAR EVA700 Digital Entertainer")
The Netgear EVA700 is a media streamer that allows you to play audio and video content from your PC, to your television using your wired and wireless network connections. The device is compatible with Intel’s Viiv platform assuring compatibility and ease of set up. Let’s have a closer look.
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Design and Installation
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Size Comparison: EVA700 vs. a normal sized desktop Keyboard
The device is similar in dimensions to a standalone DVD player, pretty much so, since it would be sitting next to the television. The front panel is bare and has the IR receiver, power LED and an USB port. Though the device is mainly meant to connect your PC to the TV, you can still hook up a thumb drive directly to the front USB port and view its content on the TV. There is no display or control buttons on the front, laying entirely the responsibility of the controlling the device on the remote.
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Installation is simple and direct. First, you need to connect the EVA700 to the television. You have the options of SCART (mostly used in Europe and Australia), Composite, S-Video and Component. Surprisingly there is no HDMI, more so since the device is capable of playing HD content. Hence, it will have to do that over component. For audio it has the regular RCA ports and S/PDIF. Bundled with the device is a composite video cable along with RCA stereo connectors.
Next, you have to connect the EVA700 to your wired or wireless LAN connection. For a wired connection, you have a 10/100 Ethernet port and dual Wi-Fi antennas supporting 802.11b/g standards for a wireless connection. Wi-Fi is good for streaming regular, standard definition content but for high definition it’s advisable to use a wired connection.
Bundled Accessories
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Performance**
Netgear insists that setting up the device is very simple and indeed so. You just need to connect the PC and the EVA700 to the same wireless router and run the Media Center Connect Software and you are off and running. It supports a wide range of formats across both standard and high definition. For video it includes MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9, MOV and DivX, however there’s no H.264 support at this time. For audio there’s MP3, OGG, WAV, AAC and WMA. We tested out a variety of audio and video formats. All supported audio formats played back without any problem although some video formats (MOV) didn’t show up in spite of being listed. Upon further probing we figured that since the Media Connect software belongs to Microsoft, it chose to ignore some of the non-Microsoft formats. The only solution to that is to download an alternate media streaming software.
The interface is simple to use but lacks search features.
Conclusion
The device is easy to set up and supports a wide variety of formats but is expensive as hell at Rs. 17,000. The same thing sells for around Rs. 8000 in the US. If you are so keen on watching your DivX collection on TV, you can go for a standalone DivX DVD player (shouldn’t cost you more than Rs. 4500). Though it’s a little time consuming to burn discs, the 2-5 minute wait is definitely worth the price.
The device is more suited to people who want to stream digital media content to their television from devices like laptops, storage devices and computers, all under a single roof.