Netgear NeoTV NTV550

We've come a long way in home entertainment products. HDTVs and Blu-ray players now often come with streaming media services, the ability to play media files over USB drives, and even built-in Wi-Fi. If you want to access those services with an older HDTV, the Roku LT ($49.99, 4 stars) can be found for just $50, and the Western Digital WD TV Live Hub ($199.99, 4 stars) offers both a ton of storage and plenty of online services. The Netgear NeoTV NTV 550 tries to offer a similar service, but at $199.99 (list) with no storage, no Wi-Fi, and no Netflix, it falls short as a media hub.

The NeoTV does let you access both local drives and networked devices and play movies, music, and pictures from them, but onboard storage or a better service selection would better justify this device, which effectively does little more than many HDTVs and Blu-ray players with USB ports and DLNA networking. If you have a huge library of media on your networked computer, USB hard drive, eSATA hard drive, or NAS, it can be a worthwhile way to get your content to your HDTV (that is, if you can run an Ethernet cable or spend extra on a Wi-Fi adapter). But if you just want to access a few files over a network or with a USB key, it's too much.

Performance
At first glance, the NTV550 looks like a router, measuring a flat 1.4 by 8.5 by 5.7 inches and weighing just 15 ounces. The front panel holds a Power button, a USB port, and an SD card slot. There's another USB port, an HDMI output, component outputs, a 3.5mm A/V output, an optical audio output, and eSATA and Ethernet ports around back. With no integrated Wi-Fi, you'll need to get Netgear's WNCE2001 wireless adapter for another $80 if you want to use it on your local network without running a cable to your router.

The 8.4-inch remote could easily be mistaken for a Blu-ray player's remote. It has a number pad, direction pad, playback controls, and even four color buttons that double for Video, Music, Photo, and Web buttons. It sits comfortably in the hand and is thoughtfully laid out, though the number pad is puzzling for a device that doesn't access channels.

A multitool of file playback, the NeoTV supports over a dozen video file containers and codecs, including H.264, AVCHD, multiple MPEG-4 types, and DVD ISO and VOB files. It can handle plenty of audio files, too, including MP3, FLAC, WMA, WAV, and any digital video or audio media that uses Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS 2.0+, DTS HD, or DTS HD MA for up to 7.1-channel surround sound output. It also supports multiple subtitle file formats for movies and can show JPEG, BMP, PNG, and TIFF image files. All of these files can be loaded through an SD card, a USB or eSATA drive, or a networked computer or hard drive, and the device can automatically scan those connected devices to catalog all the media it can play.

Online Services
Despite its impressive file support and local network abilities, the NTV550 is slim on online content offerings. It can access YouTube and a handful of news video feeds and Internet radio stations, but there's no Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu, Amazon Instant Video, or any of the other commonly used streaming media services online. The NTV550 might let you watch nearly any video file on your local network, but if you want to use Netflix and other streaming video, you're going to need an HDTV or Blu-ray player with those services.?

When you connect a USB or eSATA drive or insert an SD card, you can scan it and any other connected devices for media and let the NTV550 catalog all photos, videos, and sound files together. Depending on how large the drive is and how many files and folders of any kind are on it, this can take a while. Once cataloged, they can be viewed in neatly arranged lists of genre, artist, and other categories. Like all systems that use metadata, this can result in holes and duplicate genres in your lists, and if your movies don't have any metadata you'll have to browse the catalog like a file manager.

In my tests, the NTV550 handled media files well with only one small hiccup. It played various videos encoded in DivX, AVI, WMV, and even MKV formats. The only issue was an MKV video with dual audio encoded for multiple language tracks, which played silently despite trying both tracks, which the player detected and could be chosen through the Audio menu. Interestingly, it handled subtitles flawlessly. If you have a movie file on your computer, the device can probably play it, and if it can't, you can convert the file to a similar format it can play.

The Netgear NeoTV NTV550 is a nice idea for marrying your PC content with your HDTV, but its high price and lack of online services and Wi-Fi keep it from earning a recommendation. It does exactly what Netgear says it does, but when most decent HDTVs and Blu-ray players can already play files from USB drives and support DLNA for playing files over a network, $200 is too much for a product that still forces you to run a cable. The Editors' Choice Western Digital WD TV Live Hub also lacks built-in Wi-Fi, but it comes with 1TB of storage so you can still keep a big chunk of your media on the box instead of strewn across your home network, and it has more online services, making it a much better media hub for your HDTV. If you want to save money and get built-in Wi-Fi, grab the Apple TV ($99, 4 stars) and put your media on iTunes.

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