Table of Content
Whatever content is on those drives or devices will show up in an onscreen menu system or GUI that we found fairly easy to use. If there's a small knock against all these types of media players, it's that it takes a little while for the unit to initially recognize and load all the media files. The FreeAgent Theater includes PC syncing software for transferring photos, music, and movies from your computer to a hard drive. Plug in the hard drive, and the software will automatically sync your PC’s media collection to the external drive. Also included is a cradle for attaching any of Seagate’s FreeAgent Go portable hard drives to your PC to make transferring media easier. Plug in a hard drive, click the MediaSync button in the PC sync software toolbar, choose your sync options, and you’re ready to go.
For one thing, the FreeAgent Theater doesn’t play unprotected AAC audio files at all. So any music you’ve ripped from your CD collection using iTunes’ default settings–along with any iTunes Plus (DRM-free) songs you’ve purchased–can’t be played via the FreeAgent Theater. Also, the only way it can play back MPEG-4 video is if that video uses the DivX, Xvid, or AVI codec. • This is a DLNA-compliant server, so you can stream content to any playback device on your home network that has DLNA support.
FreeAgent Theater+
Naturally, you can set up the Seagate Central to perform automatic backups of the computers on your network. For Mac users like me, the device works directly through Time Capsule; all I had to do was go into my Time Capsule preferences and change the backup disc from my usual Time Machine to the Seagate Central. The focus of this review, though, is on Seagate's media management tools, and the first step to managing your media is to get your media files onto the drive. The Seagate Central is a DLNA-compatible server; the drive has default folders in place for Videos, Music, and Photos, with sample content in each. Seagate recommends you hardwire your computer to the router via Ethernet to transfer media files for the speediest and most reliable results. I dropped about 20GB's worth of movies and a lot of home videos into the Videos folder, as well as a ton of personal photos and my entire iTunes content folder .
As with the Western Digital player, you can connect other storage devices, whether they be hard-drive-based or flash-memory-based via a separate USB port. Seagate also makes it a point to note that you can connect your digital camera to that same USB port and view photos--and videos--straight off the camera . But if you take home entertainment seriously, you may want to consider other options. Seagate jumps into the media server or NAS drive fray along with players such as Apple, Roku, Google and so many more.
Seagate FreeAgent Theater
Provides Suppliers with self-service tools targeted to the needs of their business. Check your drive's warranty status and browse our warranty related documentation.
Use the Lyve Cloud portal to configure and manage your object storage and services. Provides access to product training, sales and marketing resources, deal registration, and more to our VARs, Integrators, Resellers and other channel partners. Deploy machine learning models to access real-time recommendations, prevent fraud, and predict failures. By and large, the FreeAgent Theater does an admirable job; and for many users, it should provide an easy, painless way to release the media held hostage on their PC. For high-end users, though, the lack of HDMI output may be a deal-breaker.
FreeAgent Theater+ Firmware Update for US
Of course, I was nowhere close to using up the full 4TB of storage at my disposal. If you've amassed a large collection of high-definition movies and/or high-resolution music, then the transfer process will be a lengthier one. The media files reside in a Public folder on the Seagate server that can be accessed by any DLNA-compatible players on the same network. Pretty much every new "smart" HDTV and Blu-ray player has built-in DLNA playback support, as do many streaming media players. A vast array of DLNA apps are available for your smartphone or tablet so that you can stream content from the server to your handheld device.
All that said, we should note that the PlayStation 3 does an even better job with images--and it has DivX support for playing back video files. Yes, it costs almost twice as much as this, but it also plays games, offers Blu-ray and DVD playback, and can access PC-based media files over a network. That integrated slot is actually one of the strong points of the Seagate media player, which is relatively compact and sleek--it looks like a not-so-curvy mini Sony PlayStation 3. The idea is that you connect your FreeAgent Go drive to your computer, drag various image, music, and video files onto it, then slide it into the slot on the FreeAgent Theater, which remains connected to your TV. Alternatively, Seagate includes some software that puts a user-friendly interface on the transfer and file organization process that makes things easier for less tech-savvy folks. In the final analysis, before you purchase any of these types of media players, you'll have to ask yourself what you plan on using it for.
"seagate theater"
Accelerate geophysical data delivery with storage that’s built for the edge. Overcome the cost and complexity of storing, moving and activating data at scale. • The Seagate Media app's interface gets the job done, but its design is pretty vanilla. Some of the icons within both the iOS and Android app are a bit too small and cryptic. • The device's form factor and quiet operation are very home theater-friendly. Shop your favorite products and we’ll find the best deal with a single click.
On a positive note, we liked how the Seagate displays a preview of the file on the right side of the screen when you highlight that file in the menu. All in all, we felt the Seagate's GUI was slightly snazzier than the Western Digital's. View registered products, register new products, and find product specific support.
I generally use Samsung's AllShare app on my Galaxy tablet, and I had no trouble connecting to the Seagate Central and accessing files for seamless playback. The Seagate Central has the ability to stream most major file types, including MP4, M4V, MKV, AVI, WMV, OGG, MP3, M4A, WMA, AIFF, WAV, and FLAC. However, playback support is ultimately dictated by the playback device. For instance, my Android tablet could not play back any of the MOV files or iTunes-purchased TV shows in my collection, whereas my iPhone 4 could.
He's also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Nook e-books and audiobooks. The following procedure provides the steps necessary to add the FreeAgent Theater media sync software to your Windows system. By default this software searches your documents and settings folders for movies, music, and photos and places them in folders on your FreeAgent Go. • This is a basic single-drive NAS device without RAID to provide advanced data protection.
This Seagate has some nice things going for it, including an attractive design and generally good performance . However, the Western Digital is more versatile in terms of file formats supported. As part of our tests for these products, we throw a few hard-to-read file formats at these players, and of the four files we loaded, the Seagate wasn't able to recognize any of them. Most notably, there's no support for H.264 and AVC, which have become increasingly popular. Nor does it support AAC audio, which is what you'll get from any iTunes purchase.
And note that the "container" doesn't always imply support for the underlying format--for instance, one MKV file we had didn't play, because the underlying file used H.264 encoding. True, you can use a converter to make most video formats compatible with the FreeAgent Theater, but we're comparing native support to native support. You have a few options for connecting the FreeAgent Theater to your TV. For the best quality--and to view HD-resolution video of 720p or 1080i--you need to go with component video connection .
Both are designed to be paired with portable hard drives that are loaded with media files. Unlike the Seagate FreeAgent Theater, however, neither Western Digital nor Iomega integrated slots for their own respective USB hard-drive products. Beyond simply offering a DLNA server, Seagate has gone the extra step of designing its own free media app for both iOS and Android, called Seagate Media. I downloaded the iOS app to my iPhone 4 and the Android app to my Galaxy tablet. Both apps immediately detected the Seagate server I had set up and allowed me to access the files.
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