Seagate Free Agent Theatre

Seagate’s new Free Agent Theatre allows users to connect their hard disks to a television screen so that they can watch videos and photos or play music through the TV.

Unfortunately, Seagate seems to have been taken by surprise by the appearance of rival products such as Western Digital’s WDTV, because the Free Agent Theatre gives the impression that it has been hurried out by Seagate without being thought through properly.

The Free Agent Theatre is designed primarily for use with the company’s own Free Agent portable hard disks. Should you have one of those it can be slotted into the bay that’s built into the front of the Theatre, which will instantly connect it to the TV set.

However, there is also a USB socket on the front of the Theatre unit that allows it to be connected to any other USB hard disk or memory key.

At the back of the Free Agent Theatre there are composite, component and s-video connectors for attaching it to the TV, as well as a Scart adaptor. Oddly, though, there is no HDMI interface to connect it to a high-definition flat-panel screen. The component video will provide the same quality, but the people with HD TV sets prefer to use HDMI, so it’s an omission.

It also lacks support for some important file formats. While it can play a wide range of files - including MP3 and WMA audio and MP4 and Divx video - it can’t play the AAC music format used as standard by iPods and iTunes music libraries, or the popular H.264 video format used by portable devices such as the iPod and the Playstation Portable.

The video files it can play did looked very good when we put them through our high-definition television set using the aforementioned component connection.

However, the lack of an HDMI connection and its inability to play some modern music and video files mean that the Seagate Free Agent Theatre is a less attractive proposition than it could have been.