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FreeAgent Theater Review

jtpratt — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:42:48 +0000

Check out my FreeAgent Theater review, I just purchased this thing! I’ve been wanting one of these for a really, really, long time – and finally I found one that does just about everything I want. I mean, I’ve had DVD players with USB ports, and TV’s with USB ports – and nothing seems worth a damn for playing downloaded movies or mp3′s with long filenames (or pictures for that matter).

Enter the FreeAgent Theater + HD Media player! You can get this thing for under $200 (sometimes under $100 if you don’t need the 500GB storage). What this little box does is allow you to move all your music, pictures, and movies from your computer (laptop or desktop) to your TV. No more having to store crap on your xBox 360 or Playstation 3. The media player has a dock for a 250GB or 500GB external hard drive. You also get a separate docking station to connect the drive to your computer. If you have a Windows or Mac based PC the included software will automatically copy your media to the drive. If you run Linux – you have to copy your own s**t to the drive. In either event, plug the drive back into the bay on the media player and voila! You have your content from your PC to the TV!

The media player will to 1080i and Dolby 5.1 playback. You get a remote in the box, and there’s a front USB jack if you want to plugin in a USB stick, digital camera, or camcorder. Connect to your PC with a composite cable or HDMI if you prefer (or S-video and audio jacks). It does play in NTSC and PAL – and it doesn’t say so on the Amazon page, but if you reference the Seagate web site you’ll see that it does play MPC, AAC, WAV, OGG, WMA (window media), JPG’s, subtitles, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (which means AVI (windows), VOB, ISO), and MPEG-4 (which means both DivX and Xvid).

So download movie clips, trailers, rip DVD’s, record streaming video – move it all to the external drive, and watch them all on your PC without ever having to burn another damn DVD or CD! That’s why we bought it (lol)!

check out the FreeAgent Theater price at Amazon:

cheeck out the FreeAgent Theater price on eBay, I’ve seen it for as little as $50-$100, and many of them have the external drive included!

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ - Digital Multimedia Receiver / HDDr NO RESERVE!!!
	USD / 28.01 (5 Bids) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-08 01:00:36
Seagate STCEA201-RK FreeAgent Theater+ HD Network Media Player HDMI NETFLIX 1080
	USD 84.99 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-10 02:20:51
NEW Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD media player 1080i NIB
	USD 199.99 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-10 23:15:18
Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD 1080p Media Player (STCEA201-RK)
	USD 30.00 (1 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-11 16:22:36
Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD Media Player Solution,S/N:2GF20C1M, P/N:9SX2A0-520
	USD 111.99 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-13 16:29:34
SEAGATE FREEAGENT THEATER HARD DRIVE USB HOME THEATER
	USD 0.99 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-13 23:46:30
SEAGATE ST905004CEA1E1-RK 500GB FREE AGENT THEATER HD MEDIA PLAYER SOLUTION
	USD 225.00 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-07 20:35:37
Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player (STCEA201-RK)
	USD 69.99 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-09 06:56:35
12V Seagate FreeAgent Theatre replacement power supply
	USD 11.04 (0 Bid) \| Buy It Now End time: 2012-02-09 14:12:35

Rip DVD’s No More – HDD Player Fixes Everything

jtpratt — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:44:49 +0000

I want to talk to you about the HDD Player. For about $30 or less, you can buy a HDD or Hard Disk Drive Multimedia Player Encolsure that will blow your mind! These external enclosures can be either Sata, eSata, or IDE – and they even have wireless and wired LAN versions. You won’t find these in a brick and mortar store anywhere – usually only on eBay or an online gadget shop? Why? Well, the big electronics giants would never want to see you have something this cool – EVER!

This post of part of The Smorgasbord Tech Reviews series!

Because it’s keeps you buying their clunky, proprietary garbage. They want to tie you into DVD burners that won’t backup your legal store bought DVD’s, that don’t support ripped and burned DVD’s, and devices that use HDCP and DRM to limit what you can to with your own electronics! Your dvd player might only play DVD’s coded for North America – and you want a region free player that will play DVD’s from anywhere in the world!

What if you could have a device that would allow you to store all of your ripped DVD’s and movies, YouTube, MySpace and online video, your entire mp3 collection, in addition to the thousands and thousands of digital pictures you have accumulated!? You need a storage device – and entertainment storage device at the center of your house! With 500GB hard drives at an all time low – the time is right for a device like this! I’m telling you – it works great for me because I am so tired of plugging in my laptop to our 42″ flat screen just to watch some video I edited or something from our digital camera or camcorder.

The HDD or Hard Disk Drive Enclosure Multimedia Player

Most of these hard drive enclosure boxes will do the following:

Play mp3′s

Play mp4′s

Play Divx movies

Play AVI videos

Play DVD’s

Play Audio CD’s

Play VCD’s

Play SVCD’s

Play JPG pictures (slideshow)

Most come with a remote, some even play AVI and Windows Media WMV and WMF formats. I’ve even seen quite a few new ones that EVEN have a memory card reader slot. Also, many have optional connectors for either a TV (AV cable or s-video) or PC (VGA connector). You can usually use up to a 80GB+ hard drive, and depending on which case you get, it can be either 3.5″ PC form factor, or a notebook HDD. The one I mentioned with the memory card reader, it even has a one-touch button to copy everything from a memory card to the hard drive without having to hook it up to a PC at all. Most also have 5.1 channel digital audio output support as well. These things work with Windows PC’s from 95, to 98, 2000, Windows XP and Vista, in addition to Mac and Linux, and NTSC or PAL formats. They even have handheld ones with an LCD screen – so you don’t need to hook it up to anything!

You can get an AWESOME deal on one of these on eBay. As always, but from reputable sellers with lots of positive feedback, know how much shipping is in advance (usually $10-$30 depending on there it’s being shipped from and it’s weight), and read all the details to make sure that your HDD player does exactly what you want when you get it. Ask the seller questions in advance so you know what you’re getting.

Also, if it’s still not clear – let me point out why this is one of the coolest things out there. You can put your pictures on it. Put your music on it. Convert and rip movies and dvd’s to it. Watch them on any PC you take it to, or any TV you hook it up to. Copy pictures from your digital camera flash card with the touch of one button, and watch them on your television in seconds. No more figuring out how to burn downloaded movies to DVD, VCD, or SVCD. Imagine all the money you’ll save on blank DVD’s and CD’s alone. Just copy to this drive and watch on your TV, then delete when you’re done. If the hard drive dies or is too small, just replace it with another one. These are cool, you will use yours all the time ( I know I do ).

I’m going to show you some HDD player auctions ending on eBay soonest below. If you want to see everything, just…

Click to view all HDD Player auctions on eBay right now

[nms:hdd player,6,0,0,smorgas.hdd.player]

here’s even more hdd players on eBay now:

also – if you’re looking for region free dvd player for your home entertainment center, or a region free portable dvd player – here are bunches of options new and used on eBay right now:

HOWTO: Rip DVDs in MPEG-4 AVC (x264), multi audio, subtitles, Matroska

jtpratt — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:20:31 +0000

MPlayer and MEncoder are amazing tools not only for watching but also for backing up DVD content. This HOWTO demonstrates how to create a very high quality rip with next generation video (H.264/x264/MPEG-4 AVC) serveral audio tracks (Vorbis in this case, can be other formats like AC3, MP3) and subtiles (vobsubs) in a Matroska container. In order to install the necessary applications you will need the multiverse repository (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu).

1. Install needed applications

Code:

sudo apt-get install mplayer mencoder normalize-audio vorbis-tools mkvtoolnix gpac x264-bin

2. Rip DVD to harddisk

Code:

mplayer dvd://1 -v -dumpstream -dumpfile title.vob

1 is the stream you want to rip.

3. Rip subtitles

Code:

mencoder dvd://1 -nosound -ovc frameno -o /dev/null -slang en -vobsubout title

1 is the stream we extract the subs from
slang is the desired language (en, de, fr, etc.)
title is the basename of the vobsub files, in this case title.idx and title.sub

4. Convert audio to PCM

In case you want to keep the original AC3 audio step forward to 6.1!

Code:

mplayer title.vob -ao pcm:file=audio1.wav -vc dummy -aid 128 -vo null

title.vob is the stream we already ripped in step 2
audio1.wav is the name of the resulting PCM file
-aid 128 chooses the first audio track

If you would like to rip another audio track (e.g. commentary or different language) repeat the above with the next track number (-aid 129 would be the second track) and save as audio2.wav.

5. Normalize audio

Code:

normalize-audio audio1.wav

Repeat on audio2.wav etc. if you have more than one audio track.

6. Convert audio into Ogg Vorbis

Code:

oggenc -q5 audio1.wav

-q5 is the desired quality of the first track. Wikipedia: Many users feel that Vorbis reaches transparency (sound quality that is indistinguishable from the original source recording) at a quality setting of -q5, approximately 160 kbit/s. Additional audio tracks can be encoded accordingly with lesser quality in order to save disc space.

6.1 Keep original Dolby Digital AC3 audio

In case you do not want to compress audio but keep the original AC3 track simply extract it from the VOB with

Code:

mplayer title.vob -aid 128 -dumpaudio -dumpfile title.ac3

7. Encode video

This example uses the two-pass-method and presumes progressive PAL video. Read here how to deal with telecined, interlaced and NTSC video.

First, we have to get rid of black borders around the movie. Hence we playback the file with the cropdetect filter.

Code:

mplayer title.vob -vf cropdetect

Move a little forward in the movie using the arrow-up key and let MPlayer find the correct settings for you. If you are finished quit MPlayer and copy the part -vf crop=720:432:0:76 from the console. Of course your values might differ from this example.

Now create a file which runs the first and second pass consecutively.

Code:

gedit videnc

Paste the following into that file and adjust the cropping values with the ones you got from the procedure above

Code:

# First pass
mencoder -v\
         title.vob\
        -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:432:0:76\
        -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=4:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:turbo=1:pass=1:psnr:bitrate=1000\
        -nosound\
        -of rawvideo\
        -o title.264

# Second pass mencoder -v\ title.vob\ -vf pullup,softskip,crop=720:432:0:76\ -ovc x264 -x264encopts subq=6:4x4mv:8x8dct:me=3:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:pass=2:psnr:bitrate=1000\ -nosound\ -of rawvideo\ -o title.264

Since MEncoder is not able to save directly into Matroska containers we encode the video in raw format convert it later into .mp4 and finally mux everything (video, audio, subtitles) together with mkvmerge. Interested in what all those options mean? If everything fits your needs save videnc.

Encoding of MPEG-4 AVC video is a time consuming matter. On my AMD Athlon64 3000+ a 90 minute movie takes about 3 hours for the first and again about 5 hours for the second pass. Best is to let your machine work over night while you sleep.

Run videnc

Code:

sh videnc

8. Mux video into MP4 container

Good morning! ;)

If encoding went fine we are ready to put that x264 file into an MP4 container

Code:

MP4Box -add title.264 title.mp4

You can already verify the result by playing it in MPlayer.

9. Muxing it all together

Start up the MKV files creator

Code:

mmg

and simply drag & drop your files into the Input files box

title.mp4
audio1.ogg
audio2.ogg
title.idx (not title.sub!)

You might have noticed that we did not scale the video during the encoding process. That is because Matroska handles the aspect ratio itself. Simply define the languages and track names in the Tracks box and choose the correct aspect ratio. Choose an output filename (the default would produce title.mkv) and hit Start muxing.

Changelog:

9. Oct 2006 – fixed encoding parameters
9. Oct 2006 – added telecined, interlaced, NTSC

Todo:

Encode to a certain file size

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=273635&goto=newpost

originally posted: 2006-10-08 16:15:04 -0400