Seagate FreeAgent Theater Review

However you choose to acquire these files, there is a good chance that you have a variety of multimedia content on your computer. You enjoy looking at all of those photos you take with your digital camera. You enjoy listening to your ever-expanding collection of MP3 songs. You’ll watch a range of movies and television shows using video files. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple solution to send that content to your living room for viewing in your home theater?

At its core, that’s the idea behind the Seagage FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player Solution. By their own branding, this device will let you “bring all your stuff to your home theater… and play it with ease.” You could consider alternative solutions, but the key here is that the FreeAgent Theater is simple, straightforward, and robust.

FreeAgent Theater Features and Highlights

You can expect the FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player to operate in a similar fashion as any other set top box for your television. The connection and setup process is not unlike what you’d do when setting up a video game console or a DVD player. The difference, of course, is that there are no discs involved. Instead, you can freely load up your multimedia content onto the provided FreeAgent Go portable hard drive.

There are three bundles available from Seagate. You can opt to buy the FreeAgent Theater on its own if you already have a compatible FreeAgent Go hard drive. Alternatively, they sell bundles that come with either a 250GB or 500GB hard drive. These bundles also come with the same computer stand for the hard drive as the ones that come with standalone FreeAgent Go drives.

Naturally, you can buy additional hard drives to further expand your collection. There is also a USB input on the front of the device that will accept a range of flash drives, compatible cameras, and other similar storage devices.

The FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player will support video, audio, and picture files from either the attached FreeAgent Go hard drive (which pops up in a similar way as an old eight-track tape) or a connected USB device. Video support includes MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (AVI/VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (AVI/Xvid), and DivX. In my experience, it would not support MP4 or MOV files. There’s also support for a range of audio formats (MP3, AC3, WMA, WAV, OGG), JPEG photos, and subtitle files (SMI, SRT, SUB)