NETGEAR NeoTV 550 (NTV550) Review (page 5)
Photo playback and functions
The various ways to select your photos are by: Recently Added, Year, Camera, Categories, by Folder or you can display your whole library in a nice long list. Folder view allows you to browse all the folders/directories in your media collection and select your photos just like you would if using Windows Explorer.
As with videos, you can either browse your photo collection by filename view or by thumbnail view.
Like with videos you can also use alphabetic filtering to trim down a list of photos but since all my photos use the default filename assigned to them by my camera I didn’t find this option particularly useful!
The Neo allows you to view your photos in a slideshow. To start a slideshow you simply press the Play button on the photo you want the slideshow to start from. Alternatively you can press the Play button on a folder containing photos and it’ll run a slideshow of all photos in that folder.
During a slideshow you can hit the menu button to bring up a menu allowing you to change the transition effect, the photo duration (how long a photo remains on the screen before switching to the next photo) and the “Zoom”. Zoom in this context is either Fill Screen or Full Image.
You can also rotate an individual photo by hitting the Rotate button on the remote or zoom in or out by hitting the Page Up or Page Down buttons. Once you’ve zoomed in you can then pan the image up, down left and right.
You can also play music whilst your slideshow is running. This can either be from your own personal collection or you can choose from a whole host of internet radio stations.
When browsing by thumbnail it takes approximately 20 seconds to full a 10×3 screen with thumbnails which is disappointingly slow I think. That said this time drops to less than a second the next time you display them, clearly underlying the importance of specifying a cache location when you configure the Neo.
As with video cover art it would be great if the Neo could do this caching during a scan rather then do it on the fly when you come to actually view your photo collection.
Music playback and functions
As with videos and photos, you can either browse your music collection by filename view or by album cover view.
You can browse your music collection by Recently Added, Artists, Genre, Playlist, Categories (ie. tags) and also Folder View.
Just incase you missed it previously, the Neo supports gapless playback. Yup, gapless playback. How long has the user community been asking NETGEAR to implement this? Jeez, it seems like forever!
As with the previous EVAs you can create playlists on the fly. You simply add songs to the current playlist by pressing the OK button on each track. You can then save this playlist for use later.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to edit these playlists from the UI once you’ve created them. Nor can you add a whole album to the playlist with a singe click, you have to add each track individually.
I think it’s fair to say that media streamers have a long way to go before they offer the same level of functionality and flexibility as dedicated audio streamers such as the Squeezebox or Sonos. This criticism isn’t just aimed at NETGEAR but is aimed at every media streamer on the market today. Without exception.
Incase you’re wondering about screenburn when playing your music then worry not, the Neo has an inbuilt screensaver function and the album cover of the currently playing track will slowly bounce around your screen.
When browsing by thumbnail view it takes approximately 10 seconds to fill a 10×3 screen with thumbnails the first time round. This is much quicker than for photos (although still too slow for my liking) which I presume is down to the fact that my album covers are a much lower resolution than my photos and therefore the Neo has less work to do to resize them. For reference my photos are around 6MB each whereas the album covers are less than 100k each. As above, the Neo should really do this caching beforehand.
Flickr Photos
As well as being able to view photos stored on your computer/server the Neo also allows you to view photos on Flickr.
You can view photos by tag, search on any tag or search for an individual user’s photos. You can also add photos as favourites for viewing at a later date. You can also add individual users to your favourites.
One thing I found rather neat is the Neo stores your previous searches to save you retyping the search each time.
As with your own photos you can run slideshows, change the transition effect, duration and zoom. You can also manually pan each photo and play music whilst the slideshow is running, either your own music or internet music.
YouTube
For those of you who just can’t keep away from YouTube you’ll be pleased to hear that the Neo supports it. Not only that but it plays 1080P videos. Yup, 1080P!
You can select those must-see videos by Most Viewed, Top Rated, Recently Added, Featured and you can also search for videos using the virtual keyboard.
There is also a “My YouTube” option to enable you to log in to your own YouTube Account where you can select from playlists, favourites, subscriptions etc.
I’ve never been a big fan of YouTube personally but now it is being used more and more to host hi-res professionally made videos rather than those naff, low-res grainy out-of-focus homemade attempts it’s really becoming rather a cool thing to use and I’m starting to love it. (Gosh, did I really just admit that?!)
Internet Radio Player
This option allows you to choose from a whole host of pre-determined radio stations (via Shoutcast) or you can manually specify them (you just need the URL). Bit-rate on the pre-determined stations can exceed 128Kbps so are of fairly decent quality.
Radiotime is slated for October/November 2010 but it would be prudent not to build your hopes up about this incase things change. UPDATE: Radiotime has now been implemented.
Internet News Channels
As above you can either choose from a host of pre-determined channels (NBC Today, CNN News, NBA Podcast, Engadget Tech Blog etc) or can manually add your own.
ReadyNAS Photos
To be honest I’ve no idea what this option does as I don’t own a ReadyNAS but I’m sure it’s wonderfully useful!
Streaming TV and Movies
This option is not available on the firmware I’m using but the marketing material I’ve read suggests it will be available November/December 2010. As with Radiotime don’t rely on this becoming available just yet.