With a shape vaguely reminiscent of a shrunken PlayStation 3 Slim, the Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ certainly looks like it belongs under your TV. It comes with all the connections you need to hook it up to your TV and home network, including HDMI and component video outputs, digital optical and analogue outputs, two USB ports (one front, one back) and, of course, 10/100Mbps Ethernet.

What it lacks straight out of the box is any kind of built-in storage, although that’s easily rectified by plugging in a PC-formatted external USB hard drive or by docking a FreeAgent Go hard drive into the slot under the removable top panel. To use either option with your Mac, you’ll also need to use the supplied Free Agent Theater software, which lets you copy your media files manually or automatically.

Luckily, the FreeAgent Theater+ supports a wide range of audio and video codecs, including the ones favoured by iTunes such as AAC, MP4 and MOV, although you won’t, of course, be able to use it to stream DRM-enabled music and movies downloaded from the iTunes Store. You’ll also notice that just because something says it supports a given codec, it doesn’t follow that it’ll necessarily play it. Some of our test HD clips were rendered beautifully using the Seagate FreeAgent Theatre+’s 1080p Full HD output — but they were completely silent, despite the fact that they had AAC stereo audio attached. That’s something all the media players here suffered from to a greater or lesser extent, so your mileage may vary.

Where the FreeAgent Theater+ really excels is with its ancillary features, which include access to media websites like YouTube, Picasa and Flickr, as well as RSS video feeds. The predominantly blue user-interface is pretty straightforward to use too, although it tends to present your audio and video media which generic icons rather than cover art or thumbnails from each one.

There’s a lot to like about the Seagate FreeAgent Theatre+. It works nicely with your Mac’s media files most of the time and is easy to get up and running. We also like its neat user interface and the fact that you add a FreeAgent Go hard drive to give it some much-needed internal storage.