The Stone Edge

Early last month, when I was wandering in a Fry’s store, I found a returned Netgear EVA8000 digital media center. I have always been looking for a good multimedia hub for my living room, but had never found a satisfying one. The feature set of EVA8000 looked pretty good to me, and I remembered some good reviews from Maximum PC, Amazon and Cnet. So I decided to give it a try.

My requirements for a media center actually are not that complex,

1. It must be able to play regular DVDs — how can you call it a media center if there is no DVD-playing feature!? But I want more than just simply playing DVDs. Since I still have some VCD movies, of course I expect it to play them as well.
2. It has to play other video formats from hard drives, such as Divx, AVI, MPEG4, QuickTime, … You name it, I want them all! Playing ripped DVD ISO files is a must, too. In this way, I can manage all my DVD collections from the media center without changing disks.
3. It should be a good manager for my music collections. When I say good, I mean something like iTunes, and even more formats — OGG, WAV, …
4. I have thousands of digital pictures on my desktop in my home office room. Even though I love to show them to my friends, I don’t want to show my messy office, . So, the media center has to connect to my home network and present my digital photos on my LCD TV — trust me, pictures look so much better on a bigger screen, even a mediocre one looks great!
5. I have a 7.1 speaker system with a receiver and I definitely don’t want to compromise my acoustic experience. The media center needs to drive them all.
6. Remote control is a must — using a keyboard or mouse just doesn’t feel like in a living room.

Some other features are good to have, but I don’t have to have them now:

1. TV recording. I know this is one of the most-wanted features for a media center, but fortunately it is not a big deal to me. I am not a big TV fan (as you can imagine, I spend most of my time on Internet instead of TV), so I think I can live without it.
2. Blu-ray DVD and HD-DVD play back. As any new technology, currently these players are ridiculously expensive, just like a $20 DVD drive at seven or eight years ago. I always think it makes more sense to upgrade later when they are more affordable.
3. YouTube and other online videos! Well, I know these low-resolution videos won’t look very good on a HD LCD TV, but sometimes it’s fun to watch them together with friends. Not mention that the Internet does have some high-def video contents such as movie trailers.

As you can see, the feature list for my media center is not too long, isn’t it?

Knowing what I am looking for, you will understand why I was interested in the EVA8000. It is such a slim box, looks like a regular router. According to the manual, it has very strong network capabilities. Even though it doesn’t have a DVD drive and can’t play DVD discs directly, I think I can compromise if it can do other things really well.

The installation process of EVA8000 was fairly easy. It took me a little bit time to understand its menu system, but once figured out, everything is straightforward. But for a non-technical person, it may not be that simple. After setting up the network and my network storage places (I shared my photos and videos to my local home network from my office PC as Samba mounts — yes, my office PC runs on Linux!) , the EVA8000 started scan my media files. This is a painfully looooooooooooooooooong process. I meant it! It took literally more than half hour to go through my 9000 pictures and some video files! The manual said it was building a database for my media collections, but later I found its so-called database is just a plain text file with all my media files listed! I just couldn’t understand why it spent that much time on scanning, even with a wired network connection.

Anyway, once the scan was finished, it was ready to do some interesting things. First I tried to play a DVD ISO file stored on my remote PC. Surprisingly, it did a very good job! The streaming was very smooth, not jumpy at all! But soon I found the audio was only in two channel audio, and I am sure this ISO is encoded in 5.1. A little bit disappointing. Then I tried to browse my pictures from this box, which turned out to be a terrible experience. It is extremely slow. Browsing in sequence is barely acceptable, while random slideshow is totally unusable! I don’t fully understand why DVD playback is good but picture browsing is so slow. One reason I can think of is DVD playback may have a dedicated hardware decoder, but browsing pictures has to use its CPU, which is seriously underpowered.

However, I have to say, this product is actually a pretty good one. It has a lot of potential and is going to the right direction. It has powerful network functionality, with HDMI output, slim and good-looking. If it could come with a DVD drive, and the whole playback experience could be smoother, I might have just settled with it. But now, I knew I have to give it up. Because my goal is — yes — a PERFECT media center!

After returning the item back to Fry’s, I went through my feature list again. I realized that most of the features are actually PC functionalities and what I am looking for is indeed a Home Theater PC! This idea made me excited because I love building PC. Now I have another excuse! But since it will be a PC, I have to add another must-have feature to the list: the softwares must be FREE — aka NO Microsoft Windows! I knew this would make the whole process harder, but, well, who cares! We are geeks, aren’t we?

That’s how I started building my perfect HTPC!