New Boy-Toy: EVA8000 from Netgear.

I am a bit sad about ... to write this down ... well, I thought it was a good idea to invite more less deck-binded hardware into our cosy home.

EVA8000 from Netgear looked quite ok to replace the old athlon-based-energy-killing-video-/audio-stream-server and it's penguin-based; what else do you need? Even a small card is within the package, telling everyone about the GPL and seperateley the GNU-stuff - bought!

And it works quite well ... almost (what have you thought, though?).

@first: Before you directly connect something or attach it to the net (explicitly written down for dumb users) - get a cheapo USB-stick as 'media-data' device. EVA8000 (eq. with 128MB of RAM) needs EXTERNAL(!) memory for your media library - so all scanned data has to be saved somewhere, if you have a NAS or a USB-drive, EVA just chooses it and starts writing (if she has the right to do so - M$ Windoze-users somewhere?)

... building several directories, meta-information of your music and video-files, internet-radio preferences, configuration files of Samba-servers ... containing 'cleartext passwords' of your SMB-shares and ... WAIT, WHAT?

Yep.

No way. So let's check the amount of data we're talking about - I took my first data as example: approx. 3,500 files on your HDD/NAS/whatever needs about 800K of metadata for the EVA-8000 from Netgear.

Hmmm ... it does not save any pictures, RSS-feeds, podcasts, videocasts ... but who knows what may come up next - so maybe a 1 GB-stick should be enough for max. of 1TB of real data.

So, at first without anything else attached but a USB-stick on the back of EVA (configured as her personal monkey ;-) could feed her as cache, safe config place and archive without bugging any kind of TB-HDD spinning up and down. *Phew* - the passwords remain unsecure, but it's safe that they stay local on the stick, nor (what about EVAs-web-interface?)?

Upcoming: Try to introduce to EVA a local or not 'web-shoutcast'-based webradio which works perfectly with any (open and closed) client from 'Foobar' up to 'xmms' (did I mention winamp?)- Vigor's lastFMproxy vs. EVA - no chance to listen to last.fm or Pandora, because of 'missing' metadata or capabilities (sad but true) - and we are not talking about HDMI-stuff here. What are standards for? Do we ignore them? Did someone hire enthousiastic script kiddies and no pros? I do not know it - but one thing for sure: EVA8000 is not yet far from plain acceptable.

P.S. Someone might ask about the r/w-cycles of USB-sticks and the whole discussion - as answer for EVA8000: Do you really scan every night your whole archive? Why? What for? Leecher? Get something else - I do it on demand ... idiots.

P.P.S. Thought and tried about manipulating the 'netradiofavourites' (XML-file) of EVA8000. No chance. It seems that Netgear only supports one kind of format - whether it is mp3 or not, but only shoutcast? Really funny? Did'nt the 6 year OLD NOXON from Terratec support any kind of mp3? Yes it did. Glad to own one - sad for Netgear - we are talking about the penguins, aren't we?