The EVA 9150 is here

by Volker Weber

The new EVA 9150 arrived at vowe's magic flying circus today. And I am quite impressed. One of the surprises was the huge remote. Without any configuration I was able to control not only the EVA but also my Sony Bravia screen.

eva9150remote

The UI is very similar to the 8000, so no surprises here. As usual I have set up the player without PC access, so I was pleased to see that it can play Youtube and other Internet channels on its own. It also makes good use of its internal hard disk to buffer videos it is playing. There is ample space to download the whole video while you start watching.

The only thing bothering me was the fan. I had enabled file sharing, so I can push files to the hard disk, but then the fan was running at 30% even in auto mode. In a quiet room I can hear that fan. At 100% it becomes unbearable. I now disabled file sharing and the fan. Hope this does not overheat the device.

All initial tests were successful. Without any hacks it played everything I threw at it. I am reading the manual. There are so many things the EVA can do that I need to approach this systematically.

The editor-refuses-to-give-it-back award is all but guaranteed.

Here are some FAQ and the full documentation.

Comments

Obviously they don't get micro ergonomics right. Compared to Apples' remote, the action count on this is tenfold! Shudder.

Roland Leißl, 2009-04-30

The EVA8000 was actually already capable of showing ...well, most...YouTube movies without the "Digital Entertainer" Windows companion program when using the most up-to-date firmware.

As owner of the 8000 I really wonder what the 9150 has to offer that justifies the steep price. There were not many things that I couldn't make my 8000 do (in companion with a linux server) that I now would expect possible with the 9150.

Besides: I actually like this remote! I instead get a shudder when I see just a handful knobs that seem to be not enough for the features that I expect from my hardware ;-)

Oliver Weise, 2009-04-30

Funny thing is that the manual states you need the Windows software running on a PC, but the 9150 plays YouTube videos anyway. I think this is depending on the format the video is available in. Both boxes cannot play flash video but H.264.

If you have an 8000, I suggest you stay with it. The new machine has a different design, it contains MIMO antennas within and it supports draft n dual band (2.4 and 5 ghz) wifi. That is enough to stream 1080p over wireless. It also comes with a hard disk slot with a 500 GB drive installed.

On of the funny things is that it contains a feature to monitor a torrent client, but not the client itself. It can monitor the client in my ReadyNAS, but although it has all necessary capabilities like local storage, it does not come with a client.

Volker Weber, 2009-04-30

On a recent trip to Hong Kong I picked up an ioBox HD100 for about $300 CAN. It runs an software package (read: linux distribution) called Networked Media Tank . Although it does not have wireless built in, it does manage the heat of a 650GB drive without a fan and has several nice features like Transmition built in so it can download torrents directly to itself (if that's your thing), as well as several web 'channels' like YouTube. It also has a wide range of codec support. I've been quite happy with it so far and have been busy ripping my DVD collection to store on it.

Andy Reimer, 2009-04-30

I've concluded the best solution is if the media player can be away from the TV - especially with a wall mounted flat panel. This begs for a remote that is not IR (or line of sight). Is the remote RF or is there some other control option ? I control my Popcorn Hour with my iPod Touch.

Glen Salmon, 2009-04-30

Yes, the device has a web interface, but I find it awful.

Volker Weber, 2009-04-30

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

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