NETGEAR EVA2000 Digital Entertainer Live Reviewed

Feature Tour

Let's take a spin through the menus to check out the EVA2000's features.

My Collection
The first menu item (Figure 10) lets you view your own content.  Your content can reside on a DLNA or UPnP A/V compliant device such as a NAS, be shared via the PlayOn server described above, or reside on a USB disk or Flash drive (Fat 16, FAT32 and NTFS supported) plugged into one of the EVA2000’s USB ports.  My Collection also lets you play rented movies and keeps track of recently played items. 

Figure 10: My Collection menu

If you select the Home Network option, the EVA2000 looks for media servers.  In my tests, I enabled the media servers on a Buffalo LinkStation Live and a Synology DS107+.  The EVA2000 failed to connect to the Buffalo device, returning an “unknown error”. But it connected seamlessly to the Synology NAS.  In all fairness, the media server in the LinkStation Live is pretty old and not DLNA-compliant.

I was able to play an assortment of video file types as well as music and view images as a slide show from the content stored on the NAS.  Similarly, I also had no problems with multimedia files read from the USB flash drive that was plugged into the EVA2000.

Figure 11 shows the options for playing the music found on my Synology DiskStation.

Figure 11: Play options for music found on the Synology DiskStation

Video Search
You can search the Internet for video by selecting this option.  Featured videos appear on the right side of the screen.  The left side of the screen is reserved for a keyboard that you navigate using the IR control.  Figure 12 shows the search results for “Apple”.  As you can see, content was discovered from multiple sources.

Figure 12: Video search results

YouTube
Figure 13 shows the YouTube search options.

Figure 13: YouTube search options

And Figure 14 shows results for this week’s most popular videos. I encountered no problems searching for or playing YouTube videos.

Figure 14: YouTube Most Viewed