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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noncomputer person,
I think updating to the latest firmware would be the best start. Let us know if that helps and we can proceed from there.
As a matter of interest, do you know what firmware it currently has?
To: Noncomputer Person
The 1.02.07 firmware plays MJPEG format files from Canon digital cameras correctly. Some earlier versions of the firmware did not play the Canon files correctly. What version of the firmware is installed in your WDTV?
This page should lead you to the various firmware versions that are available: http://wdtv.wetpaint.com/page/Firmware+1.02
If you can post a sample of your video I will be glad to try to play it on my WDTV and let you know the results. I have firmware version 1.02.07 installed.
–David
Hi all,
I have noticed that the WD can play VTS.VOB video/audio files but every couple of minutes it has drop outs or “clipping” then it resumes and does it again every few minutes until the end of the file. I do not have this problem with avi files. I also updated to the unofficial firmware version 1.02.10 so i don’t know if that has anything to do with it.
Is there any way i can roll back the firmware update to say 1.02.07 to see if if this version plays VTS.vob files without the problem of dropouts? or is it once you update you cannot go back to earlier versions?
Thanks,
Kal
Okay folks,
I reinstalled the firmware 1.02.07 official version instead of the beta 1.02.10 ( i had wanted this version for greek subtitles.) i played again the same VTS.VOB files for a good half hour and didn’t seem to have the drop out problems like with the beta 1.02.10 version.
(* i reinstalled the 1.02.07 version by tricking the WD player into thinking it was a version 1.02.11 by re naming it using notepad and it worked fine. after the update the WD states it is the 1.02.07 version in the “about” info of the WD menu. Very handy if anyone else wishes to roll back an update from a beta version to a previous official version ) .
Kal
Hi all, Love this product, but one serious area of concern that WD must fix. When you play MP3 files it shows a static image on the screen with only the tags scrolling. If you use this on a PLASMA TV for any length of time it will BURN an image and ruin the screen. All plasmas suffer from burn-in if you have static images. So be carefull. WD have to ensure the player shows a screensaver type of moving image while playing music.
David,
The WD TV does has a screensaver with adjustable settings. Maybe yours is turned off.
Look for it in settings then system.
noncomputer person
Firmware 1.02.07 will play MJPEG files correctly from Canon digital cameras. Earlier versions of the firmware played the video but garbled the audio from the same Canon cameras. So the .07 firmware MIGHT play your video correctly.
–David
David Ball
Why would you buy a Plasma anyway. Everyone knows they suck cause of this. LCD all the way man.
Hi all,
today i received my audiophile optical cable - see link below:-
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=350140455775&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOIBSA:GB:1123
I must say that the WD player playing flac music files is extremely enjoyable with a good quality optical cable. The music is more airy , soundstage more pronounced and greater detail in instruments and vocals. I have difficulty to say that pc streaming music flac files using xp and asio4all is any better than this great little WD media player. I would highly recommend this cable as it seems to offer very good synergy with the WD player.
Movies also sound much much better with this optical cable. i don’t agree with a review above to buy a cheap optical cable. if you want the best audio reproduction from this player go for a good optical “all glass” cable with good connectors to reduce phasing and jitter issues that may arise from an inferior optical cable.
Kal
HELP! I have just bought a WD Media player; connected to the TV using HDMI cable and the sound to my home theatre with an optical cable. The DVD ripped movies work fine; however the BluRay ripped movies (5.1) doesn’t have any sound! The setting on the WD for sound is set as digital. Somebody please help. The format of the movies are in MPEG-4 format.
Hi Naveed
you need to convert the audio first…use the audio converter popcorn to do it…then it will work !
The WD Media Player is great, except it won’t play multiple VTS’s in the same VIDEO_TS folder. I have a number of DVDs on a USB drive and I want to play them (so I don’t have to be constantly switching DVD disks). However, the MP will only play one of the VTS sets. For example, a particular DVD has the following files in the VIDEO_TS folder: VTS_01_0.VOB, VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_02_0.VOB, VTS_02_1.VOB, VTS_03_0.VOB, and VTS_03_1.VOB When I select any of the VOBs to be played, the Media Player somehow chooses VTS_02_0.VOB and then plays that entire VTS set. It will not continue on to the VTS_03 files, nor will it play the VTS_01 files. I have updated to the 1.02.07 firmware, no change.
Hi Guys,
Does WD Media player have the option of loading subtitles(srt) as a seperate file.Im an english teacher and need to show stuff with subtitles always and shifting and pausing very often between language tracks and subtitles.I have got a large collection of hollywood movies but the subtitles have to be downloaded as a seperate file very often since they are not always a part of the video.So far Ive been using vlc mediaplayer on my computer which gives the option of loading subtitles seperately….welcome ur comments!!!
Mark -
Update to 1.02.10 and see how that goes. They work fine for me.
Richard -
Yes I am pretty sure it will do what you want. I have avi files with a seperate file for subs and they work fine.
Does this thing play x264 files ? (I know it should, but for me this is crucial - I have a huge collection of them lol)
-Jeff
Thanks for your info and I just bought a WDTV.Its a pretty nice gadget which is really easy to use.Ive come across a problem though!!!
Ive got a lot of video files encode in MKV format with DTS sound and the WDTV seems to be giving the DTS signal only through the optical cable.There is no sound through my TV(32”Philips LCD) which is connected to WDTV with HDMI.Ive tried changing the settings in in WDTV from digital to stereo but it didnt seem to help.Video files with other audio output(ac3 etc) seem to work fine.There isn’t a problem with my TV cos I play blu-rays on my PS3 with DTS and even connect my laptop to the TV with HDMI and they all play normally.
Ive upgraded the firmware to 1.02.07
pls advise !!!
Richard,
Yes DTS is a problem that has caused a few people to be upset. The short answer is WD has never claimed it will play DTS but the word is that it may come in a future firmware update. I have heard it is because they would have to pay a license fee or something similar. In the mean time I think your only alternative is to convert the audio.
Tsudo,
It plays H264. But I’m not an expert on all the different file types, so if X264 is different then there is no mention by WD of X264. So if they are different then I would suggest it won’t play them. Maybe do some research on the specs.
Yes Tsudo is does play x264, although it doesn’t say it anywhere… I was questioning that myself before i purchased mine and never got the answer until i tried it out myself and it looks freaking amazing.
Tsudo
Just buy the damn machine a find out man. Its not that expensive plus most places will refund or give you store credit if it does not suite your needs.
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