NETGEAR NeoTV 550 (NTV550) Review – Page 2

The User Interface

The general “look and feel” of the NTV550 interface is very similar to the UI used on the EVA8000, EVA9100 & EVA9150 models but with a few subtle differences. The first thing you notice with the UI on the NTV550 is the resolution; it’s much higher than on earlier models. My TV reports it as being 1080p. We also get a snazzy looking background (“skin”) to the menus. The unit comes with only one skin currently but there is the option to install custom skins if you’re not happy with the one supplied. All the custom skins that have been developed by the user community are model-specific so you will not be able to use your favourite skin from an earlier model without modification. Hopefully the skin developers will be quick to update them for use on the NTV550 (hint hint!)

It takes roughly 50 seconds for the NTV550 to boot up from a powered-off state. You can specify which state the NeoTV goes into when you hit the power button on the remote. Personally I always have mine go into standby state which only consumes a couple of watts. The great thing about leaving it in the standby state is that when you hit the power button it is almost instantaneous to bring it to the fully powered up state where you’re ready to play your media.

So, let’s go through the menus and I’ll highlight some of the more interesting features:

Auto FPS: The NTV550 has automatic Frames Per Second support. You can manually override the FPS setting during movie playback if the NeoTV has incorrectly detected it. It’s a similar story for the Aspect Ratio; you can manually specify it, let the NeoTV automatically detect it for each movie and of course you can then manually override the setting during movie playback.

Gapless Playback: The NeoTV supports gapless playback. Hopefully this goes without saying but this feature pertains to audio only and not to video.
For those of you not familiar with the term Gapless Playback, this is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive tracks without intervening silence. Gapless playback is typically found on live concert audio CDs and classical music CDs. One track simply flows into the next without any breaks in between.

Audio Passthru & downmix to stereo: As can be seen in the screenshots to the left, the NeoTV has quite a comprehensive selection of supported audio types. These can either be downmixed for direct playback on your TV or passed through to a connected amplifier/home cinema receiver.

Slideshow transitions: The NeoTV has the usual transition effects namely; Fade, Dissolve, Shrink, Slide, Roll, Ken Burns (a slow panning and zooming effect) and random. You can also change this setting on-the-fly during a slideshow.

The Ken Burns “transition” applies to the slideshow itself so is not just limited to the transition from one photo to the next.

Cover art cache: To speed up the display of cover art (including photos) you can select an “image cache” location. This can be any writeable location on your network or on locally attached storage such as a USB thumbdrive. I’ve found things are a tad quicker if you specify local storage for the cover art cache location rather than network storage.
You can also specify a location for BD-Live caching. If you wish to use the DB-Live features on your blu-rays then this location MUST be specified.
So, I personally leave a cheap USB thumbdrive permanently plugged into the USB port on the rear of the unit and have both cache locations pointing to it.

Wrap-around menus: Enabling this option gives you the ability to scroll past the top or bottom of a list/menu and for the cursor to reappear at the other end of the list/menu. With previous EVAs if you were at the top of a list and wanted to get to the bottom you’d have to scroll downwards through all items in the list. Now you can just hit the cursor up key to jump to the bottom and when you’re at the bottom, hit the cursor down key to jump to the top.

Clear “Resume playback”: At the time of writing this feature had not been implemented.

Browse Folders option on the Home menu: As with previous EVAs the NTV550 allows you to select your media by “Folders”. This provides you with a Windows Explorer-type view of your media allowing you to drill down into your directories/folders to find the media you wanted.

However, with previous EVAs the starting point was always to select the media type first (so Videos, Music or Photos). Once you’d done that the EVA would then only show that particular media type as you drilled down into your folders. With the NTV550 there is now a “Browse Folders” option on the Home menu which will display ALL playable media as you drill down into your collection.

All shares or selected shares: By default, when you browse by folders (either media-specific content or all playable content) you are presented with only the shares you’ve previously opted to scan. On the NTV550 you can hit the [aA] button to reveal a list of ALL the shares the NeoTV has detected on your network.

Automatic updates: With previous EVAs you had to manually check for updates via the menu. The NTV550 automatically checks for updates each time you power the unit up although you can disable this feature if you wish. You can obviously still update the firmware manually either via the internet or via a USB drive. I presume that the NTV550 will only pull down “released firmware” automatically and not beta firmware but that remains to be seen. If the former, then I’d like to see an option on the menus to check for beta firmware too.