Netgear 9100 Digital Entertainer Express Review

January 28, 2010

Netgear’s new EVA9100 Digital Entertainer Express is one of the latest boxes in a myraid of contenders vying for your hard earned cash and a spot in your rack. If you’re familiar with the 9100′s older sibling, the 9150, you already know a lot about the EVA9100 – but the big difference is the lack of an internal 500GB HDD (and not able to be added) on the 9100.

At 2″ tall, 10″ deep, and 17″ wide, the design isn’t new – it’s the same chassis as the 9150. It even has the door in the front where the HDD goes on the 9150, but here on the 9100 a friendly note resides behind the door stating that the “9100 does not include or support a hard drive”. The jack pack on the back is again the same as the 9150 – sporting a front usb port, and composite, svideo, component, HDMI, ethernet, digital coax, optical, another usb port, detachable power cord, and the ever useful (for us North Americans anyway) SCART port. Wireless networking is not included, but a “recommended accessory” is the Netgear EVAW111 wireless USB adapter. The remote sports a smaller and different layout from the 9150, but who uses an IR remote anyway when they use Control4?

Setup was pretty straightforward. Included cables are sparse with only power and RCA cables, so bring your own component or HDMI connections. After unboxing and making the connections (HDMI in our case, to a Panasonic 50″ 800U THX plasma)Â I used the included remote to navigate the setup wizard. The first thing it asks is for language, before automatically detecting which cables you are using and sending a test tone to verify you have audio. We chose the Custom setup route, and chose HDMI @ 1080p for video settings. It asks you to assign a room name to the unit, which doesn’t have any affect on Control4 operations, but is more for the “Follow Me” feature and PC streaming. Next it asks for a zip code for weather. At this point there is a step asking you to install software on your computer where the media files are stored. This isn’t applicable to us, since we use a NAS with Control4, but if you’re using Netgear’s interface to build & browse coverart this is where you would setup the two to communicate. It then asks to scan for network shares – again not applicable since we are just using it as a playback device but this may apply. We then cancelled the network shares menu page (the last page) and at that point were taken to the home page.

The user interface is nice on the default skin. Another skin is loaded, but looks like an awful Windows XP Media Center skin that has no “pizzaz” at all. Custom skins can be downloaded and installed – you’ll find more information on that in the Netgear Forums. From the main menu you have options to browse video, music, and photos,Â had you setup any network shares or computers to do so. Internet Media takes you toÂ portals for YouTube video (still hard to find HD 1080p content that actually looks good on your TV), Ficker, an Internet Radio Player, Internet Channels portal with feeds to NBC’s Today Show & BBC podcasts among feeds you can enter yourself, an option to browse photos directly from your Netgear ReadyNAS, and an option to check in on your BitTorrent client’s downloads. The NewsÂ & Weather option from the main screen takes you to Internet Channels, Weather (icons and information similar to the Weatherbug Driver for Control4) and nifty Weather Maps from NOAA. It would be really cool if you could see the weather maps fullscreen, but their size is acceptable.

The more button dives into additional settings if you had more than one Netgear, such as the “Follow Me” feature where you can “transfer” the show you are watching to another netgear in another room. I don’t believe this feature has any reportability through the IP driver, but we are checking to see if we can include this feature in some programming for Control4 – where you activate the follow me feature leaving one room it would turn off that room and then automatically turn on the room where you are headed so you can resume the movie.

Additionally, you can scan for USB attached media and configure advanced options for network, power, display, etc.Â in the Supervisor Functions menu. Our unit out of the box was fairly quiet, and when digging around the menus we found that the volume is set low from the factory. Simply turning up the volume on the unit itself resolved this (not on the display or amp). For network stability, we recommend you set a static IP address for the unit outside of your DHCP range – Control4 communicates via this IP address and if it changes, your control will be lost.

Once the unit was up and running, our dealer logged in and added the Netgear EVA8000 driver to our project. Because the control commands are the same for the 8000, 9100, and 9150, a new driver is not needed. This is an IP control driver, meaning you don’t have to hot glue an IR emitter to the front of the unit, which is nice. After setting up the bindings in Composer, setting up a connection between Control4 and our NAS,Â we were ready to start testing video playback.

First, we made sure that our share contained some video files we wanted to watch. We have “aquired” copies of unprotected DVD movies that we own, as well as some unprotected Blu-ray demo media, movie trailers, and more. We added these files to our Control4 GUI by scanning or adding manually the information using the Media tab in Composer.

In regards to file format support, it’s quite broad and very similar to the Netger 9150. For video, you can stream and play AVI, DivX, Xvid, WMV, MOV, M4V, VOB, MPG, MP1, MP2, MP4, ISO, IFO, MKV, TS, M2TS, and PS files. On the audio side of things, you’ve got MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FLAC, WMA-Pro, M4A, M4P, AC3, DTS Passthrough, PCM, LPCM, and AIFF. The Express can display JPEG, BMP, PNG, and TIFF photo files and even read various playlist file formats including WPL, ASX, WAX, WVX, PLS, M3U, and RMP.

As always, the caveat is DRM files–you won’t have luck with anything that’s copy-protected. However, a few minutes of time on Google may turn up some interesting information.

Below are the results of our testing:

DVD .iso files – play back just like the DVD. Quality is…DVD quality. Menu structure and navigation support, subtitles, and alternate audio tracks can be selected and played. FF, RW, chapter skip, etc. are all present.

Blu-ray .iso files – unfortuantely, and contrary to the incorrectly worded chart on Netgear’s website that we reported on at the device’s announcement, the current firmware of the Netgear 9100 does not play back Blu-ray .iso files. It might be possible that a new firmware could support this, however with the limitation of 40mbit bitrate ceiling, I think this is a chipset limitation and we must wait for new hardware.

HD-DVD .iso files – I know, I’m probably the only guy that was excited about that format…but noÂ luck here either.

DVD .ifo files – play back fine.

720p HD .mov trailer – Star Trek 2009 trailer plays fine with no stuttering, some delay (black screen) while loading for a few seconds before trailer starts.

1080p HD .mov – 300 “1080p” trailer (actually 1920×800) H.264 @ 8.77 mbits/sec AAC 5.1 audio plays fine. Buffers after FF/RW.

On two occasions we lost IP control, but it was restored after rebooting the 9100. If you skip the PC setup intgration, it will nag you every reboot.

Blondie: Low price, plays back DVD .iso files with menu structure perfectly, integrates well with existing Control4 driver giving coverart selection & category sort on touch screens and televisions.

Angel Eyes: Doesn’t support Blu-ray .iso files, therefore no menu structure support and no BD-Live support. No internal hard drive can lead to “buffering…” messages on high bit-rate videos or after serious FF/RW sessions. Still “only” 100mb ethernet connection. Maximum bit rate for video is 40mbps.

Our take: If you don’t have a network media player that allows you to select movies by coverart through Control4, you can’t beat this box for the price. If you’re looking for something “future-proof” that can playback HD media very well, you might look elsewhere.

Editor’s Note: Netgear was contacted and notified that the chart on their website should be modified to clearly state that it does not support Blu-ray image files.