When Apple announced a 3 week delay to delivering my shiny new Apple TV I took the opportunity to creep away from the gadget monster and ponder it all. The conclusion I came to was that Apple TV wasn’t right for me.
I have tonne of Xvids and I really can’t be bothered to transcode them all - what I needed was an xvid media streamer. I decided upon the netgear EVA700, a swish new device that plays every format under the sun. And so it arrived and I set towards getting it set up. The first problem was getting the device to connect to the wireless network - it found it and accessed it ok but the device seems to ignore DHCP and make up its own address. This wouldn’t be a problem but for the menus from hell - I started to believe that netgear was an oxymoron.
I was also staggered to find that this netgear product won’t talk to the netgeat sc101 network storage box without a PC running a media server somewhere in the mix. Crazy. Still I persevered and soon xvids were streaming on to my TV, with good image and sound quality, excellent. I did have to abandon windows media 11 as the media server because, er, well, it sucks donkeys and can’t handle more than 2gig of shared media without crashing the PC. All our photos are similarly transmitted, although without thumbnails to guide you it is a bit tricky to find the image you want. But what I really wanted it for was the convenience of watching Xvids on the telly, and that it does nicely.
