Product Description

MEDIA STREAMER

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDBAAP0000NBK-EESN
• Released on: 2009-09-30
• Dimensions: 1.57" h x 4.94" w x 3.94" l, .67 pounds

Features

• Turn your hard drive into a multimedia player with the TV Live Media Player from Western Digital! Just hook your external hard drive up to the TV Live Media Player and then connect a TV to begin enjoying high definition videos, photos and audio files on a big screen.The TV Live Media Player is compatible with Dolby Digital and DTS sound, and it handles a variety of peripherals and formats, including MKV for video, FLAC for audio, PNG for photo, SRT and SUB subtitle files and PLS or M3U playlist
• s.Enjoy your entertainment without cluttering up your home thanks to the TV Live Media Player from Western Digital!
• WESTERN DIGITAL TV Live Media Player Multimedia hard drive Storage
• Multimedia hard drive

Manufacturer's Description
HD video, photos, and music - they're on your computer, your USB drives, and the Internet. Now it's easy to play a whole world of Full-HD, 1080p media on your TV with the WD TV Live network-ready HD media player.

Customer Reviews

Good but needs some tweaking
I bought this for my front room which has the router in it and so would be good for the network facility. I already have a Western Digital TV HD 1080P Media Player for the back room and have been very pleased with it, running very well from a portable USB 500GB drive mainly.
The WDTV Live works fine from an external drive just like the vanilla WDTV.
Youtube works straight out of the box.
However, the networking takes quite a lot of fiddling to get it sorted out. (I have Windows 7 by the way). Straight out of the box, it works with something called Media Streaming, where it seems to pick up files and folders from your PC that the Windows Media Centre already knows about. Avi files are fine, but it won't recognise MKV files this way. In order to get MKV files, you have to use Network Shares. This took a lot of tweaking, and reading forum posts. Eventually, it could see my shared folders and play the MKV files very well over the network. Curiously, I had to rename my Video folder to !Video - it seems to have a problem with letters of the alphabet above M ! And I had to tell it to connect to my PC using my log-in details I use to start Windows 7, rather than the easy anonymous option.
Finally the output sound can be set to either Stereo or Digital. If I use Digital, there is no sound over the HDMI to my TV for a file with digital sound (eg a MKV). Not a major problem for me as I use my digital surround amp most of the time anyway. (This may be a problem with my Toshiba XV635 tv though).
Apparently there will be a firmware upgrade soon which may help.
Overall: stick with the WDTV if you don't need the network. If you are planning on using the network options - be prepared to fiddle about.
Edit: 4 days later, a new firmware which seems to have sorted out most of those network niggles! It found the upgrade automatically - I recommend you upgrade straight away. Add at leat 1 star to my original 3 stars.

Great Media Player
I was considering a Mac Mini, but purchased a WDTV Live it arrived next day and i am not disappointed.
I had networking set up in only a few steps, shows up on my Mac which a can now move files over the network on and off the drive plugged into it.
I have it set up with a large 2TB WD Mirror edition drive which it reads about 750 GB in around 20 sec.
The interface is simple and basic.
There is not much to fault the device, it plays all my movies, its simple and cheep with no frills.

1080P Networked and MKV file compatible
Released Nov 2009. It improves on the older WDTV with faster operation and network ability. Avoids the need for a PC under the Living room TV that needs booting up everytime you want to watch a movie or having to plug your laptop into the TV's HDMI. It also streams via a wired network (or a nearby wireless router) and caters for a lot of codecs and containers within its own transcoding chip - which means your host PC or server can be as slow as a dog, as it only needs to serve the data to this unit, not transcode it.

The unit doesn't ship with an HDMI cable, so remember to pick up one of those at the same time. Don't pay too much for HDMI cables, you won't notice any different. Digital signal isn't affected by cheap cable in the same way analogue was). It's Networking capability was automatic, as soon as I plugged in the network cable, it found the DHCP server on my cheap router and all the shares in my house, including some folders I'd forgotten about!

Your NAS disk, NAS server or PC hosting can be anywhere on the network. Full HD 1080P plays in fantastic detail. You can stream from the network using windows shares or it will recognise any host media servers via UPNP (video) and DAAP (audio) protocols. I found my Linux NAS shared as a 'windows share' recognized more video file types than the media sharing via UPNP. Perhaps my NAS server just isn't passing all the possible MIME types, via UPNP, that this unit can play.

It will also play from a USB disk or flash memory plugged into the back or side (so you can even plug your camcorder AVCHD memory card straight in and play) and there are menues that allow you to copy files from source to target on the network or attached direct to the box and you can 'see' the WMDTV Live device (and it's flash or USB disk) from windows or iTUnes, so you could moves files onto the disk and off without any unplugging or carrying of drives and media anywhere.

The box also has a YOU TUBE menu (using xml rather than a html web image) and allows access to most voted, recent, most favourites or you can SEARCH yourself using an onscreen keyboard from the arrow keys on the remote (a little fiddly). The you tube novelty can become addictive on a large TV and only to be used when there really isn't anything on the TV. There is not BBC I Player, on this - so don't get too carried away.

The unit plays MKV files without a problem - DVD and Blu-ray backups (including multichannel audio and subtitle information that can be selected from the options menu) and plays AVCHD .m2ts, divx, xvids, vobs, files and DVD ISO's. It won't pick up the menu's or chapters for ISO images but will allow you to find a chapter in an MKV file from its options menu.

Photos play with a slideshow (although you have to use PLAY not ENTER and there's a random choice of transitions in the options menu). Not as nice as the XBOX slow pan-and-zoom playback but crystal clear.

Overall, I would recommend this, though its still more of a GEEK's present than a family item. Shame it's so expensive, it feels to me like it should be priced in the £58.99 bracket. There are some minor niggles with firmware - not video sync/freezing type of bugs, but more 'user ease of operation' types, which mainly can all be addressed with firmware and there is an active forum on the net for this device.


My Minor Niggles [Firmware 1.01.11 Nov 09]

1) When connected to the network, it keeps asking you to choose a share type and storage device whenever you select a new media type to view when switching it on, this doesn't make it 'family friendly' as they don't want to be hit with an array of share type questions and having to choose the correct distant storage devices when they just want to watch a movie.

2) You can't pre-set specific shares i.e. one share for photos, one for video. It just shows all possible shares for everything

3) Although DTS and Dolby digital can be put on pass-through to the sPDIF socket or 'Stereo' for down-mixing to composite and HDMI, I still found WMV HD 5.1 files that wouldn't play audio via network stream (maybe it doesn't like WMA 5.1 and prefers AC3 instead)

4) Pressing PLAY (rather than enter) will play all video files in a subfolder, but it isn't 'gapless play'. Every file starts with a black screen announcing the sound type e.g. MPEG II ACE 5.1 and it takes about 10 seconds before the next file plays, a real pain if you have a string of AVCHD camcorder files to watch [That can easily be addressed in firmware]

5) folder.jpg shows up (sometimes) as a thumbnail for the folder. But a video file for the thumbnail having the same name is supposed to show as the thumbnail but shows as a duplicate file. Would be nice to see films as video covers than windows listings.

6) FWD and NEXT would be nice if it took you to the next chapter and not the next media file.