Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player Combined with a My Passport portable drive (sold separately), this player is the most convenient way to play HD movies or user-generated videos, listen to high-quality digital music and show high-resolution slideshows of your family photos on your TV. Also works with popular USB drives, and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices.ras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices. Full HD video playback and navigation is up to 1080p – experience the spectacular picture quality of HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio. Use the included remote control to navigate through your entertainment choices using crisp, animated HD menus.
Close but no cigar
If you need something to play your avi’s and mpegs on a big screen at high res, it doesn’t get any easier than this. It takes about 3 to 4 mins for it to scan 80gbs of movies, photos, and music every time I power it on. The menu interface is nicely done and the remote is nicely done (I can quickly access all buttons without looking at it). Also, you can’t go wrong on the price, considering how much this little guy offers.
Now for the bad news. I have quite a few .ts files and mkv’s that either did not play or did play but poorly. Word of caution to the anime folks, those high-res mkv’s will play but with no subtitles. I know it’s been mentioned before but what’s the point of buying this if I still have to re-convert the files to either burn the subs (Making it a hardsub) or changing it to a .srt file? Blu-ray files suffered from artifacts making it unwatchable. It’s small enough to carry but it would have been nice to stream content over a network.
I give it credit for playing files my PS3 can’t but my PS3 seems to have better color output, can do frame by frame, rewinds and fast forwards smoother, and has a better interface. I’m going to check out Popcorn’s av100.
Excellent device with key missing features
I ordered this device through Amazon and received it the following day (Buy.com was the merchant), so I was very happy with the quick shipping. I bought this after having used an original Xbox with XBMC (Xbox Media Center) for the past couple of years. My main reasons for buying it were the fact that it’s very compact, silent (as compared to the noisy Xbox), and plays high bitrate HD content perfectly.
So far I’m very happy with it despite some major missing features. The lack of a network connection drastically reduces the convenience by forcing you to disconnect your USB hard drive to copy stuff onto it and reconnect. With the Xbox I could stream from a network hard drive and therefore I could copy newly downloaded or encoded content to the shared location straight from my computer without physically disconnecting or moving anything. Devices like the Popcorn Hour offer a network connection and other features the WD TV HD lacks, but they cost more and aren’t so small.
I love the tiny size of this device because I can easily unplug it and move it to another room, or even take it on a vacation. In situations like that the analog video and audio outputs are a key feature because I can connect to almost any TV.
Compatibility with files is not as good as the XBMC. It plays about 90% of the content I’ve collected, whereas the XBMC will play almost 100%. It does better with newer codecs and high bitrates, and has more compatibility problems with old WMV or AVI files. That said, the device runs much faster and looks amazing when playing HD content. Looks as good as my Samsung Blu-ray player when playing Blu-ray rips.
I’d love to see more UI features and better codec support added (the firmware is still version 1.0). The UI is attractive and easy to use, but very bare-bones. I’d like a way to jump forward or back in a longer video without having to FF or rewind, a way to copy files from one connect USB device to another, and many other features that WD is hopefully working on.
