They have been promising new firmware for months. Regrettably, Seagate seems to have little concern with fixing the many shortcomings of their product. I've been spending a great deal of time on the Seagate FAT+ user forum reading and hoping for solutions. Unfortunately, the fast forward only works on certain file types and seems to break down on others. This is not very useful.Īs for the tiny FAT+ remote, I like a few of the features (up to 8x zoom levels and fast forward/reverse up to 32x).
Yes, you can drop a jpg file named the same as the media file into the same folder, but rather than use the jpg as an icon, both files display. I was unable to get the device to even display icons in this mode.Īnother feature that seems broken is support for album cover or disk cover artwork displayed as an icon. Unfortunately, that's as far as the support goes. The FAT+ claims to support Media Servers and does in fact detect them if they are available on your network.
In fact, when confronted with an ISO, the player behaves pretty much like a DVD or Bluray player, with full menu support.
The player does support ISO and mkv files. The video will play but there is no support for the audio. The FAT+ played nearly everything I threw at it with the primary exception of WMV-HD files with 6 channel audio encoding. This is awkward when you have hundreds or thousands of files and folders to hunt through. In fact, network support only works in a rudimentary way. Not only does the FAT+ not sort correctly over the network, it doesn't enable the option of searching by file type either. If you directly plug in a USB drive then you have that option, Presumably if you dropped in a Freeagent drive into the built-in dock, it would allow sorting there as well. The option of sorting alpha by name does not work over network shares. You have the choice of large clunky icons sorted by creation date or small clunky icons in a list view.
My player immediately detected my Netgear Stora NAS and within minutes I was paging through menus of files available for playback. Plug it in and set your network parameters and you're good to go. Installation was pretty straight-forward. I have mine sitting on it's side with an inch on either side for airflow. The device tends to overheat quickly so I recommend leaving plenty of air space around it.
The overall physical format of this player is sleek if slightly retro-looking. While this product does just that, there are some major issues that to date remain unresolved. I purchased the Seagate FAT+ with high hopes for an affordable solution to the dilemma of playing HD video files stored on my network server to my HDTV.