CES 2007: Netgear offers wireless HD entertainment
It’s one thing to get all your MP3s and DiVX movies all neatly arranged on to one PC, but it’s another thing entirely to try and get it all back to being shown on your nice big HDTV in the lounge without forking out for a full blown Media Center PC. And it’s even trickier to do so without leaving Ethernet cable coiling through every room of the house, just waiting to trip you up as you creep to bed after a late night Xbox session. Luckily, Netgear has a solution with its newly revamped Digital Entertainer HD, which will search for, access and organise media files from your home PC or Mac, and even access the internet to stream video from YouTube too.
Having seen it in action, it looks like Netgear has done a pretty good job of making the various menu systems easy to use and an extensive search system should be pretty handy if you happen to have a very large collection of porn digital media. The YouTube support looks like it may need some fine tuning before final release as it currently lacks any real resemblance to the site itself. And if you’re worried that YouTube alone is a bit of a narrow choice, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why a quick firmware patch or two couldn’t open up even more options for the device.
Format support is pretty much exhaustive and with the notable addition of WMV 9 HD. There does however seem to be some discrepancy between the datasheet and the press release as to whether this supports full 1080p or just 1080i. The Digital Entertainer HD is due out in a couple of months in the US for the price of $349.
If you want to see it in action, take a peak at our previous footage:
Check out the rest of our CES coverage.
