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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 .
Seagate Central NAS and Media Server Reviewed
The interface is straightforward and simple enough to navigate, although there's nothing especially eye-catching or noteworthy about its appearance. Content is divided into Videos, Music, Photos, Documents, and Recent; you can choose to organize files by title, size, date, and type. You can also do a general Folder view, where you can browse the content folders exactly as you transferred them to the Seagate Central. Part of the reason Seagate chose to go with the solution it did is because the company sees itself marketing the media player to average consumers who have a lot of pictures on their hard drives. If you fall into this camp--and intend on using the FreeAgent Theater as a way to display lots of photos on your TV--then you'll be pleased to hear that the player indeed does a good job with images. It accesses even large files quickly and it has a nice selection of slideshow transitions .
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.
Zoom Selects Seagate’s Lyve Cloud for S3 Storage as a Service
Of course, if you already have a FreeAgent Go drive and are fine with the supported file formats in the list above, the bare-bones version of the FreeAgent Theater HD is definitely worth considering. • The Seagate Central is enabled by default to work with iTunes, allowing you to view the server's content through the iTunes interface on your computer. Just make sure that you have enabled "Shared Libraries" on the general iTunes preferences page. • In addition to the Public shared folder, you can create individual private folders that requite a name and password to access ... For all those, ahem, personal videos that you may not want everyone to be able to see. This requires a couple of extra steps during setup to create a user name and password, and you must enable the function within the iOS/Android app before you can use it.
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.
FreeAgent Theater+ Firmware Update
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.
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.
Seagate Home Theater System
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.
The FreeAgent Theater also plays back DivX files and had no trouble with any of the AVI files we threw at it. We played a number of video file formats on both a small 17-inch TV and a larger 50-inch TV. If you're dealing with a small TV, the picture looks pretty good whether you're connected via the standard composite cable or component, though component will always look better. When you start to step up to bigger TVs and try to blow the picture up, you're limited by the quality of your file. While the Seagate FreeAgent Theater has a decent interface and good photo display options, it doesn't read as many video file formats as its competitors.
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.
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.
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.
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