Netgear EVA8000 Review - Register Hardware » Handy Gadgets: Information, news and highlights of handy gadgets for you, the home or travel.

The Register Hardware have reviewed the Netgear EVA8000 media player which streams movies, videos, music, Internet radio, and photos from your home PCs and storage devices to your HDTV. 'The EVA8000 was a high-end product when it was announced, bundling HDMI with 1080P HD playback. But the video encoding world moves quickly. It may have been suitable when HD standards were emerging, but a few months later the situation looks decidedly different. H.264 has emerged as the HD codec of choice, although you'll also find material encoded with Microsoft's VC1 codec out there as well. Both are used on HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. MPEG 2 is still hanging in there, but for HD material it's really not up to the job.

Although the EVA8000 supports a vast array of codecs, including H.264, VC1, WMV, Xvid, Divx and WMV, it's in containers where the shipping model falls short. A container format is simply a file structure for bundling up encoded audio and video. AVI is probably the best known, but others include WMV, MPEG 4 and QuickTime. The container format doesn't dictate which codec is used, so you can have an AVI that contains video encoded in Divx and another AVI with video compressed in MPEG 2, for example.'

Read: Netgear EVA8000 network media player - Register Hardware