Seagate is jumping into the home theatre market with the announcement of the FreeAgent Theatre HD media player.
The FreeAgent Theatre media player is designed to work with Seagate’s FreeAgent Go portable hard drive, to enable users to easily enjoy stored digital media on their TVs.

The FreeAgent Theatre also comes with a front-mounted USB port for use with any USB storage device, such as digital cameras, flash drives or external hard drives. The FreeAgent Theatre will be sold as a standalone version only so users have the option of using it with a FreeAgent Go portable hard drive as a complete solution or only with USB devices they already own.

The FreeAgent sports a docking solution that eliminates cables or network setups, and it has its own remote control.

The FreeAgent Theatre supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats, and DIVX files with video resolutions for NTSC, PAL and HD up to 1080i and also provides support for subtitles. The audio formats supported include 5.1 channel surround sound, where available, and also digital audio formats including: MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG.

To download and transfer content to an attached Seagate FreeAgent Go hard drive, a Windows XP or Vista operated PC is required, with 256MB RAM and an available USB port. FreeAgent Theatre connects to any TV with either composite, S-video or component video a inputs.

The FreeAgent Theatre Media Player will be available in June at a suggested retail price (MSRP) of $249.