Installation:

The Seagate FreeAgent® GoFlex TV HD media player comes with a CD that contains the synchronization software for moving media to the GoFlex drive, as shown in the image below. Also included is a handy little utility called Seagate Thumbnail Creator which takes a single frame from your video file and like the name says, generates a thumbnail for that particular file. Sadly, the software does not support .vob, .ifo, .bup, .ogm, .stv or .mkv file types.



The Media Sync software is quite easy to use. In the below left image you can see the main page of the wizard. You can see all the pertinent information about your drive, including how much space you're using and what types of files you have copied. As you can see, we have roughly 54GB of media and are at 8% capacity. The below right image is where you actually choose what folders to sync up. It took only a few minutes for the Media Sync software to copy all of our selected files to the drive.



Testing:

We hooked the GoFlex TV HD media player to a Sony Grand WEGA 50" rear projection LCD TV (model KDFE50A10) via the HDMI interface for viewing and testing purposes.

Once we get the unit plugged in and the GoFlex drive installed, we are greeted with the menu you see in the below left image. The menu hasn't really changed much in the last year or so, with the exception of a few icon changes and the internet media bar. The next image shows all of the online media options you'll have, some of which will require subscriptions - such as Netflix.



The next image is of the Pictures menu. You can see that the thumbnails are a fairly decent size and there is the option of running them as a slide show. The image on the right shows you just how big the image gets when you select one. For reference, the resolution of that particular image is 2000 x3008 pixels.



Next up we have the Music menu. What is strange is we chose not to include any audio to sync but the software identified a few .mp4 files (which are actually iTunes movie files for our Apple TV). As expected, they would not play under the Music menu.