WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

The Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV STAJ100 is a HD digital media player for your HDTV and it acts as the main competition for the WD TV from Western Digital. In essence it is a similar kind of solution where you can fit in a Seagate GoFlex portable storage drive into the player and access media from there. The main differences actually lie within the device and how it handles media files.

The GoFlex TV from Seagate, despite being extremely similar to the Western Digital solution, is often chosen over the WD TV because of certain key differences. Whilst the WDTV is well-loved for being able to play almost every kind of video and audio file thrown at it, the GoFlex TV is loved because it does certain things very well. One such feature being its excellent support for reading .iso files. These files are often used for storing large files without fear of corruption when they are written on to a storage disk. Another aspect is Netflix support, which is missing in WD TV but is present and works really well in the GoFlex TV.

Other than that, the interface is quite snappy and has fast response times even when reading off networked drives. It has a drive bay in the front covered by a push away door where you can insert your Seagate GoFlex drives. Or else you can connect any USB storage and play files directly off it. With the optional WiFi adapter, you can wirelessly access your home network for all media files on your computer and/or your network attached storage (NAS). You can also automatically sync your media content automatically with the Seagate software. Both Mac and Windows platforms are supported.

There are two kinds of video outs — HDMI and Component and optical out for audio. Other than Netflix it also supports YouTube, Picasa, flickr, RSS feeds and some widgets for weather and news. At $85, the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV STAJ100 is slightly more expensive than its competition but it is a good value for money purchase.