Over the years, I’ve tried quite a few devices that allow you to watch and listen to your digital media through your television set. Some of these devices have included WiFi, some included hard drives, some required that you stream the content from a computer to the player and some required that you convert the content to a format that the player could handle. For one reason or another, I stopped using all of those devices except for the AppleTV. I really like the AppleTV’s user interface, but have never really liked the fact that I have to convert the files and then ’send’ them from my desktop computer to the AppleTV in the living room. I’m all about simplicity, and while the AppleTV comes close, it doesn’t quite get there. I think I’ve found a device that does get there tho. It’s the WD TV HD Media Player from Western Digital.
The WD TV doesn’t include YouTube or allow you to rent movies, but it does play the video, audio and image content that you already have, and does so in a really user friendly way.
Hardware Specifications
File Formats Supported:
Music – MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL
Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)
MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9 supports up to 1920×1080p 24fps, 1920×1080i 30fps, 1280×720p 60fps resolution
Subtitle -SRT (UTF-8)
USB 2.0 ports: 2
External Drive Formats Supported: FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ (no journaling)
Video Interface: HDMI, Composite A/V
Physical Dimensions: 1.57 x 3.94 x 4.94 Inches
Weight: 0.67 Pounds
Package Contents
WD TV Player
Remote Control
2 AA Batteries
AC Adapter
Composite A/V cable
Passport USB Drive stand
Instructions
The WD TV unit is small, allowing it to fit into even the most cramped areas of your entertainment center.
It’s made of shiny Black plastic and lacks buttons, dials and switches.
On the Left side, you will find a USB port and a reset switch.
On the back side, you’ll find an AC power connector, another USB port, an HDMI connector, TOSlink Optical audio port, and composite A/V connectors.
A small remote control with real buttons is also included along with the batteries to power it.
The WD TV doesn’t include its own hard drive like some players (AppleTV, MVIX). Instead, it has two USB ports in which you can plug in thumb drives or even WD’s own USB Passport drive.
There’s a little stand included specifically for the Passport drive, so that you can set it next to the player.
I tested the WD TV with my 32GB Kingston flash drive and a WD Passport drive. The cool thing is that you don’t have to specify which USB drive you want to view content from. The software in the WD TV reads both drives and creates one list of all the content.
Setting up the WD TV with your TV is a snap. A composite A/V cable is included in the package, that you can use to connect to your TV. While this works fine, you can get MUCH better video quality by using an HDMI cable (if your TV has that capability). The only bad thing is that you’ll have to go out and buy your own HDMI cable. Tip: Don’t go to Walmart, Target, Best Buy or other local stores to buy an HDMI cable. They will charge you $25-$30 for one, which is robbery when you can buy the same thing from NewEgg for less than $10.
After you connect the WD TV to your television and power it on with the remote, you’ll be presented with a simple user interface. You can scroll up and down to choose the main function (Photos, Video, Music, Settings) and then side to side to pick options for that specific mode.
In Photo mode, you can view images on the attached USB devices by thumbnails or a list of file names.
You can click on an image to see it in full screen. You can also rotate, pan and zoom. You can view the images in slide show mode and even have music playing in the background.
In Music mode, you can easily play your tunes. Even the album art will display on the screen while music is playing. You can choose music based on Artist, Genre and Album.
Photo and music modes are nice additions, but my main use for a device like this is to easily view my video content on my TV. I have to say that I think the WD TV does this easier than any device I’ve tried so far. Save your videos on a USB device, plug it into the WD TV, scroll through the list of files, press play on the remote and away you go. The best part for me is that no time consuming file conversions are needed. This is something I had to do all the time with the AppleTV in order to play video that I’d downloaded from the internets. I much prefer downloading the file, copying it to a USB stick, plugging the stick in the WD TV, sitting down and watching it. Easy!
Video quality using HDMI is great to my eyes. Of course it will really depend on the video itself. If you have low resolution video, it won’t look the best on a large TV.
The WD TV impressed me after I had downloaded an AVI video that wouldn’t play on my MSI Wind and wouldn’t play on my iMac using VLC, without VLC having to reindex it. I thought for sure it wouldn’t play on the WD TV either, but I was wrong. It worked just fine. The only video file that would not play for me was a really old .WMV file that I had created using Movie Maker on a Windows PC. The WD TV comes with some software that you can use to convert files if necessary. I didn’t try it, but I bet it would have fixed that file for me.
One nice feature is that you can resume playing a video if you stop it and want to go start it again later. The player will automatically remember where you left off.
While watching video, you can rewind and fast forward at four speeds (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x). I wish there was a feature to skip ahead so many minutes or to go to the end of a video. Just nit picking here though…
I really like the WD TV HD Media Player from Western Digital. Its small size and ease of use has me sold. It’s definitely going to stay in my entertainment center until something better comes along.
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Product Information
| Price: | 129.99 |
| Manufacturer: | Western Digital |
| Pros: |
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| Cons: |
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By far the biggest disappointment for me is that I cant zoom my very high resolution 4:3 photos to just fill a widescreen TV without black bars and without terrible stretching distortion. It cant be that difficult. What is the point of 3000×4000pixels when you dont even use your available TV screen!? I dont have time to resize and convert 12000+ pics…
Perhaps they can put this to firmware update No 1? Otherwise it wont be used nearly as much by me.
Thanks
Chris
IF YOU HAVE ANY IDEAS OF ARCHIVING YOUR DVD COLLECTION ON A MASS STORAGE DEVICE, AND THEN WATCHING IT ON THIS OVERATED PIECE OF JUNK…. FORGET ABOUT IT!!! UNLESS YOU LIKE WATCHING YOUR VTS FILES IN PIECES, THIS IS NOT THE MACHINE FOR YOU. FreeAgent Theatre IS MUCH MORE FUNCTIONAL, AND STRAIGHT FORWARD. A QUICK COMPARISON OF THE TWO REMOTE CONTROLS WILL GIVE YOU SOME INDICATION AS TO EACH OF THE DEVICES CAPABILITIES, AND USING THEM WILL IMMEDIATELY PROVE IT. HAD A SEAGATE FOR A COUPLE WEEKS AND WAS VERY IMPRESSED. BOUGHT A FEW WD HD TVS AS CHRISTMAS GIFTS, TRIED ONE…AND THEY WERE ALL ON THE RETURN COUNTER TWO HOURS LATER.
BUT, IF ALL YOU’RE GOING TO WATCH IS LOW- QUALITY CRAP YOU DOWNLOAD, BE MY GUEST. WHY WOULD YOU NEED AN HDMI JACK FOR THAT ANYWAY?
YOU CAN’T POLISH A TURD.
Curt,
I suggest you learn how to use the product before you bash it. I’m not sure how this machine can get any easier to use?
You can watch full unconverted rips of DVDs without a hitch. It plays every other type of file I’ve thrown at it with the exception of Blu Ray ISO rips. It plays the .mts blu ray files very well however. It doesn’t get any better than Blu ray quality. Does the free agent play 1080p? There’s a ton of these media players out there but a lot play 1080i only.
Bottom line……I think you’re way out of line. I’ve tried many products and this one has the best bang for your buck by far.
I just actually bought the WDHD TV Live as well and so far I’m impressed with that as well, despite the fact that my relocation to Dubai is affecting my ability to access some internet radio stations.
P.S. You don’t seem to know how to use your keyboard (all caps?) so I guess it shouldn’t suprise me that you can’t figure out how to use the WD unit.
Hey Millertimewest,
As you have probably seen from my previous posts here I have had this device for over a year now and love it. Recently a friend of mine asked me what is the best media player for her to buy for her husband for Xmas.
They mainly want to look at photos and listen to music, not so much of the viewing movies. My question to you is do you think the WDHD TV Live is better than the original WDHD TV and if so why?
Also having used other players is there any others she should consider such as the Xtreamer?
Thanks for your opinion.
Millertimewest and CURT
Right on Millertimewest. Curt is obviously a usless person with no patience. I agree the remote is bit slow (a whole 3 sec delay sometimes) but its not worth handing back. What a loser. WD HDTV is the best looking devise of them all and is small and compact and doesn’t look like a big chunky 80″s VCR. As for Curts comment about playing individual VTS files, he obvioulsy doesn’t even know how to copy a simple dvd to harddrive. HEY CURT, IT DISPLAYS MULTIPLE VYS FILES BUT PLAYS THE MOVIE RIGHT THROUGH TOOL.
As for your comment on low quality I think you need to read what you buy as WD HDTV is 1080p loser. I reckon the guy you handed them back to at the counter was thinking “what a idiot, this guys has no clue what he is on about”
WDHDTV ALL THE WAY PEOPLE. BEST MACHINE EVER. DOES IT ALL AND LOOKS FABULOUS AGAINST ALL OTHER CHUNKY COMPETITIORS.
PS – I THINK CURT HAS A FETISH FOR POLISHING HIS TURDS
Steve – amen brother!
Jeff – Honestly….I only use the WD unit for movie watching so I’m not the guy to answer your questions regarding pictures or music. To be fair as well, my affinity to the unit is soley based on its ability to play video. It may very well have holes in Pictures and Video that I’m not fairly considering in my assessment.
As far as the difference between HD Live and traditional HD, the big difference I see in the specs is the ability to better handle DTS audio, although I haven’t confirmed it. Of course the ability to network the Live unit is an obvious difference as well as the ability to check out You Tube and online radio. The unit is the same size and looks the same with the exception of a revised back panel. Control is the same. I do sometimes experience the lag that people talk about, but I’ve found that since I’ve combined all my remotes into my Logitech Harmony remote that its operated in a much more consistent manner. Oh ya the other difference is a cool preview mode for video which is in addition to the original Thumbnail and List mode.
Cheers
Curt is obviously a walley,i have one and its brilliant no lag with remote noticed yet and it plays mkv files at 1080p no probs, which was the reason i bought it, as my laptop cannot handle them.All in all a great piece of equipment.
Steve
I do know how. What I’ve done works on Nero Movie Time, Windows Media Centre, and Freeagent Theatre. I’ve got 250 dvd’s backed up to hard disk! (full disk, all menus, all extras, no compression). Why would I do them all over for Western Digital TV with no DVD navigation? And since you want to attack ME instead of my review, without explaining yourself in technical terms, YOU are the quintessential tool. For someone who spent only $100 on what you claim to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, you’re hostility is confusing. You really should be very happy you own one and I don’t.
Gotta love gangsta consumerism! Better not say nothin’ ’bout my GE fridge beeeee…otch!
It does so make ice cubes!
Clowns.
Hi guys,
I love this device. Got one for about 2 months now.
I have a comment about this part:
While watching video, you can rewind and fast forward at four speeds (2x, 4x, 8x, 16x). I wish there was a feature to skip ahead so many minutes or to go to the end of a video. Just nit picking here though…
You can skip per 10 minutes. Press FF then Skip.
Also a commend about Curt:
He’s is right about the DVD’s (VOB files) not having a menu. But that’s not why this device was made. 1080p all the way baby!
Tho you can just press play on the folder where you DVD is in and play it from start to finish.
BTW Curt, you might want to get a new keyboard. It seems that your Caps Lock is stuck.
Does anyone know if it is bad to have your WD HD TV and external HDD sitting next to a plasma TV with nothing between the 3 components? Like CRT TV’s were affected by other magnetic components next to them, are Plasma sets the same and could the WD TV and HDD do it?
Thanks in advance of any answers.
Curt
Sorry I don’t speak monkey language. The bottom line is if you wanna watch a dvd with all the features, menu’s etc then use your dvd player tool and stop wasting time on sites like this that have surpassed dvd players. Why would you want to watch dvd menu’s ect anyway. The movie is the only thing worth seeing which WD hd tv does excellently. To all people who wanna see crap extras and menu’s I can give you 3 dvd players as they are all now collecting dust in my garage thanks to this great devise. You sure you don’t want one Curt. From your previous comments perhaps you should stick to working old chunky devises for dummy’s.
Jeff – I wouldn’t think there should be any concern. I think initial concerns were with audio speakers being close to your TV. I remember seeing an older TV distort when a friend had some old unshielded speakers near his TV. You’d notice very quickly if there was a problem anyway and it was never permanent unless you left it there. I have my equipment right next to my LCD without any issues.
As far as Curt goes I think we all agree he doesn’t know his head from is arse. His latest response still shows he’s confused. First off…hostility…..read your ALL CAP post and then we can talk about hostility especially given the fact that your comments are not at all based on fact.
Second Curt you don’t have to ‘redo’ anything. You can play the movies as they are by simply playing the first vob file from the VIDEO TS directory. You will not get menus but who cares. You can still watch the extras if you want by simply picking the individual files which is no different than having to click a menu button. If you do not leave the DVD files in the structure that they are initially burned in then the WD will only play each individual VOB file on its own. (I tried to eliminate the Audio TS and Video TS folders and ran into some problems.)
Anyway…..since you don’t own a unit and don’t like it (for reasons still unclear) I may have just wasted my time since there really is no reason for you being on this site.
Later
Does anyone have any suggestions as to why my WD TV HD won’t play the AVI files that I spit out of final cut pro ? I’ve tried changing the settings for different compression rates but the media player doesn’t seem to like them. Also, I thought it was supposed to be able to play the MOV files from final cut ?
hi,
great review,
i like the device and already have one,
but i was wondering, any device available that can do the same job + RECORDING, because sometimes we all like to record something and view it later or share it with others,
i know there are devices that can do the recording thing, but i was wondering if i can get an all-in-one device like the WD plus recording function,
thanks
Hi All
Anyone know how to make a video playlist added in the latest firmware. I do not know where to start.
hello all,
good review,I just purchased this and absolutley love it. Was looking for something highly portable to take to my rec property and this does more for me than i had hoped for.
I may just buy one for both home and the cabin.
hi all,
nice review. i already owned this for more than 6 months and agree that it is very easy to use. main problem is with the digital audio where some files cannot be played (not its fault).
my other popcorn version 1 can play all my .avi files one after another like in a playlist. just need to check that this wd can do the same as well. thanks in advance.
Doesn’t anyone right in here anymore. I need help with Playlist people. Make it happen.
Mine is on its way from Amazon and will arrive hopefully at the beginning of next week. Delighted by this review but nobody has mentioned the network abilities. I don’t intend to directly connect any external drives as Julie did. My primary reason for buying this is to stream content from my D-Link NAS via my (wired) router. Can anyone confirm the abilities regarding streaming 1080p content over a LAN?
Just got this WD a day ago, before a purchased it a read all the features and comments it. I can rate it now 9/10.
Only 1 thing that want to know, can i connect this device to a a receiver in order to utilize my sorround speaker when i watch movies?
Thanks
Yes Rogel,
Connect with a toslink cable to your reciever and your surround sound will work perfectly.
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