Seagate GoFlex TV HD Review

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Seagate GoFlex TV HD is a standalone media player that boasts compatibility not only with Seagate’s own GoFlex Ultra Portable drives but with any USB storage.

GoFlex TV HD​

Opening the box, we see the GoFlex TV HD, power adaptor, remote control and proprietary composite video and component video cables. Note that there are no HDMI cables included. Note that there are no internal storage included in the GoFlex TV.

Box Contents​

The GoFlex TV device is a glossy black plastic box roughly the size of a paperback. On the front is a hinged door hiding the GoFlex drive bay. There is also an USB2.0 port for all other storage devices on one side.

Front view with GoFlex Ultra Portable HDD inserted​

Behind, we find the power, proprietary component video and composite video outputs, digital S/PDIF, an HDMI 1.3 port, a 10/100 ethernet port and another USB 2.0 port.

Rear View​

The remote control is very basic. There are the standard navigation, playback, volume and menu buttoms. Response time from clicking the buttons to the display was pretty good though. There were not much lag on the interface.

Remote Control​

 

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As the GoFlex TV HD is designed to be used with existing GoFlex HDDs, the best way to playback media on it Is to pop open the bay, push in the GoFlex HDD and let the hotswap SATA interface load the contents and you are good to go. For other portable storage, you can use the USB2.0 ports to connect thumbdrives and what not into them.

Setting up the GoFlex TV HD is a simple job of connecting the power adaptors and either the component video and composite video cables to the proper A/V inputs of the TV or A/V Receiver. For better picture quality and sound, you can get a HDMI cable and use that instead of the included cables. If you want to use the internet features, you will have to connect the Fast Ethernet port to your router or switch using a standard RJ45 cable. There is also an option for a USB WiFi Adaptor which Seagate sells separately.

The User Interface is straightforward and gets the job done. It is divided into 3 rows with the top menu showing options for Movies, Pictures, Music, Internet and Browse. The Browse menu option is like the Windows Exporer where you can see the contents of harddisk or network shares connected. In the middle are shortcuts to internet services which are supported. Lastly, the bottom row shows the shortcuts to connected devices like TVs or media streamers hooked up over the network using UPnP.

Main Menu​

For media playback, the GoFlex TV handles most content types without a hitch. It supports a broad range of video codecs (MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (VOB/ISO), MPEG-4 (Xvid), DivX®, DivX HD, Xvid HD, AVI, MOV, MKV, RMVB Real Media, AVC HD, H.264, WMV9, VC-1, M2TS, TS/TP/M2T, BD ISO) at up to 1080p HD resolution, audio codecs (AAC, MP3, Dolby® Digital, DTS, ASF, FLAC, WMA, WMA Pro, LPCM, ADPCM, WAV, OGG) and photo types (JPEG, MJPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF).
Picture quality, depending on the sources are as good as it gets. If you feed it Full-HD BD ISO, M2TS, you will get sharp and crisp images. For slideshows and images, JPGs of 1920x1080 is the best.
The only problem I had was when viewing BD ISO over the Fast Ethernet port. It’s just not fast enough for streaming the Bluray videos. It’s a pity Seagate choose to save on costs and not include a Gigabit Ethernet port.

MKV Playback​

As for internet-based content. The GoFlex TV HD supports viewing Netflix in the US, YouTube, Paramount, vTuner, Mediafly, Picasa and Flickr, as well as offering video and text RSS feed support and custom finance and weather widgets. The interface for searching is simple but tedious as there is no keyboard and you will have to input the characters one at a time using the onscreen keyboard. Another thing to note is YouTube videos will only play in standard definition and its horrible. Something I think Seagate can easily fix with a firmware update.

Search Input

YouTube Search Results

Browsing Flickr​

The GoFlex TV HD does its primary job pretty well and offers a simple and clean solution for viewing HD media. It further expands the features available to the GoFlex product line, if you have some GoFlex Ultra Portable drives around, just slot them in and all the media files are accessible. No messy USB cables to deal with. If Seagate fixes the Youtube HD streaming issue and adds in a Gigabit Ethernet port, this device would be complete. Last I checked Harvey Norman is selling the GoFlex TV HD for SGD 189.