Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Review

Seagate is one of the best memory based device manufacturer and has made a mark for itself in the storage industry. It makes very reliable products and prices them pretty low to cater to the general public. Today, we will take a look at the Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD – its latest product which basically allows you to access your videos, songs and images on a monitor or TV. You need to couple it with a portable Seagate HDD to view the multimedia content directly on a monitor.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Specs:

• Dimensions: 7.2 x 7.0 x 1.2 inches
• Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Video Output: Composite, S-video, Component
• Audio Output: Stereo, Coaxial S/PDIF
• Supported Formats:
• Video: MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI/DivX /Xvid)
• Subtitles: SAMI(smi), SRT and SUB
• Video resolutions: NTSC 480i/480p; PAL 576i/576p, supports video (HD and upscaling) up to 720p/1080i
• Audio: MP3, AC3 (5.1 audio – Dolby Digital) WMA, WAV, OGG
• Photo: JPEG files up to 20 megapixels
• Price: $279 with a 500GB FreeAgent GO Drive

Review:

The Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD has a very nice design and looks very good in black. It has a glossy black lid which is a fingerprint magnet. It is pretty portable with dimensions of just 7.2 x 7.0 x 1.2 inches and a weight of about 1.6 pounds. Just besides the HDD port, you find lots of buttons for navigation, power, menu options and play/pause controls. It also sports a Infrared port for the remote, a button to eject the FreeAgent drive and a USB drive to attach other devices. It comes with a lot of connectivity ports. It has Composite, S-video, Component video outputs, compatible with almost all TVs. It does miss out on HD though.

To setup the Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD, just install the bundled software on your PC, connect the FreeAgent Go drive to your PC and sync the media to the drive. The bundled remote is very easy to use and provides most of the basic features. The interface of the Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD is intuitive and very responsive.

The Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD supports a lot of multimedia formats and a wide range of resolutions. It can play the MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI/DivX /Xvid) video formats, the MP3, AC3 (5.1 audio – Dolby Digital) WMA, WAV, OGG audio formats and supports resolutions upto 720P/1080i. It can also display JPEG image files. The display quality is superb when coupled with a good display and there is no lag. The sound quality is equally amazing as Theater HD supports Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Supports Many Formats

Cons:

• No Support for AAC, WMV, DRM

Our Rating: 3.5 / 5.