NETGEAR Digital Entertainer Express (EVA9100)

When I talk of mass market, I'm talking about the media players for the average consumer; not, for example, those that can only be obtained from specialty retailers and custom electronics pros, e.g. Kaleidescape, etc.

Anyway, I own two other media players (D-Link DSM520 and Seagate FreeAgent+) and have extensively researched others (e.g. WD Live, Asus, Zinwell/Briteview, etc.), and while that does not qualify me as an expert, I can still confidently make the claim in my review title. None of the other players deliver the kind of experience the Netgear does. It is quite obvious that Netgear is serious is about the media server/player market. There are so many features that differentiates this player from the others, that I cannot do it justice. Anyway, I will list a few.

First, it is standard sized, so it fits nicely with other standard gear, e.g. blu-ray player, receiver, etc., especially handy for stacking in a cabinet or rack mounting. All of the...Read more

I think it is great for playing downloaded files wirelessly from my laptop. It does play everything; if they could fix these three things it would be the best media player around. 1) Does not play sound on 1080 files. I have heard the issue is the sound is too high quality but all the fixes posted on forumns are not working for me. 2) The .6 TB hard drive I have attached disappears and I have to reboot the system to use it every time. 3) Playon (for hulu) disappears and I have to reboot it.

Fix those problems and this machine will be incredible.;

Fantasic product. I used to own the predecessor to the 9100 - the EVA8000. This one is far superior in terms of performance. The EVA9100 must have more memory available as the performance when switching between videos, buffering, and altogether playing content is fantastic. Netgear got smart by not requiring us to purchase a wireless-ready unit. The 9100 is now $100 cheaper than the when I got the 8000 because of this, and you can still add USB wireless if you want. Interface is the same, but very functional. However, this unit now scans network shares for updated content on-the-fly, rather than requiring you to do a scan - very nice. Plays virtually any file you throw at it - awesome. Found that audio on some media files wasn't coming through the HDMI interface though. This was problematic until I realized that I could (in addition to the HDMI cable) attach a coaxial (or optical) audio output from the EVA9100 to my receiver and now virtually all audio plays. Definitely a...Read more