Interface issues slow down what’s an otherwise capable home media player for music, movies, and photos.

 

Western Digital’s WD TV is the latest attempt at solving the “last mile” problem--namely how to get your digital content from your hard drive to your television screen. There are plenty of media streamers, game consoles, and standalone set-top boxes that’ll get the job done, provided you’ve got the chops to handle getting all the right pieces playing nicely together. But WD has taken a different tack. By stripping a media player down to the bare bones, they’ve created a simple and flexible unit that makes it easy to bridge the gap between your media and your entertainment center. And--best of all--if you have high-def content, the WD TV can push out a 1080p signal.

WD TV is dead simple to use, although an inconsistent interface and limited connectivity keep it from being the magic box we’ve been hoping for. About the size of a Stephen King paperback, the WD TV is built to be portable. It connects via HDMI or composite AV cables, if you haven’t made the switch to HD yet. Beyond that, a power cord (included) is all you need. Oh, and it’s BYO storage. The WD TV doesn’t include a hard drive, but has two USB 2.0 ports to connect to disks or flash drives. Western Digital includes a handy cradle for using one of their portable My Passport drives, but as our tests bore out, any modern USB hard drive will likely work. There’s no network connectivity, so you’ll have to manually connect the drive to a computer to load media. That’s the WD TV’s strength--and its weakness. Loading media via USB is simple, but we wanted to just plunk some new movies or music onto the device via our existing network without having to plug and unplug anything.

The interface is easy to navigate with the included remote. While the WD TV will display album and movie art, our experience was hit-or-miss. The WD TV was easy to use, but we were frustrated that it did not allow us to navigate a music library using existing metadata--Album and Artist folder structures had to be created on the drive in order to drill down that way. On the plus side, the unit wasn’t terribly picky when it came to format. We were able to play .mkv videos as easily as .mp4s from our iTunes library, and music in everything from the new unprotected iTunes Plus to FLAC, unprotected WMA, AAC, and MP3 format. Of course, protected WMA and iTunes tracks and DRM’d video won’t work, but that’s hardly Western Digital’s fault.

The WD TV is a super-simple and highly portable media player. We’d love to see some network connectivity and a more flexible interface, but sometimes just good enough is just that. Good enough.

WD TV
COMPANY: Western Digital
CONTACT: www.westerndigital.com
PRICE: $129.99
REQUIREMENTS: USB hard drive with movies, music, or photos
Ultra-simple. Portable. Plays a ton of media formats. Can output 1080p. Supports digital-audio output.
No network connectivity. Album/movie art display is inconsistent.