After months of unconfirmed rumors about its maybe, possibly imminent arrival, Western Digital finally released its next-generation WD TV media player--just mere days after we finished our Dec/09 issue, in which we named the previous-gen model as one of our “2009 Gear of the Year” favorites. We had a few niggling criticisms of that earlier version, but in the latest model, Western Digital has made some excellent improvements to what became our favorite set-top box for media playback.
With the unit plugged into your home entertainment center, you can take all the videos, photos, and audio content you’ve got on your Mac and play them back on your television or home stereo. WD TV Live supports HDMI for full 1080p HD output, but you’ll have to buy your own cable for that. (The HDMI cables at your local big-box store are grossly overpriced. Find a local electronics shop or order online to find the same cables for 20 percent of what the big guys are charging.) There’s also a SPDIF optical audio out for users with high-end home theater rigs. The player doesn’t have any storage of its own, but you can plug in nearly any standard USB drive (including flash drives) that contain media.
WD TV Live plays back media from connected or networked drives.
New to the WD TV Live is network capability. Connecting the unit via Ethernet to your router instantly adds access to any DLNA media servers or shared volumes on your network. It’s the single killer feature we missed in the original WD TV, and it’s implemented quite well. Without any configuration hassles or software, the WD TV instantly recognized a NAS drive and two DLNA servers on our home network. And besides recognizing your existing shares, the WD TV can also bring any attached USB drives onto your network, which makes moving content to your WD TV from your Mac trivially easy. No more shuttling portable drives back and forth to your computer--now you can move files over your network to WD TV Live. There’s also support for a growing number of USB Wi-Fi adapters, so you don’t even need a wired connection to take advantage of Live’s best trick.
Now that WD TV is networked, there’s also support for online content. You can watch YouTube videos, view Flickr photos, and stream music from Live365 and Pandora. In particular, we enjoyed the Pandora access, which allowed us to bring our existing Pandora stations to our home stereo (for free, naturally). The Pandora interface includes the familiar Thumbs Up/Down controls for fine-tuning your stations, and displays album art and track information on your TV as the music plays. You can’t create new Pandora stations from WD TV, but that might be a blessing for some, as the system’s onscreen keyboard is vexingly difficult to use. Letters and numbers are laid out in a Qwerty keyboard pattern, but the virtual keys are listed alphabetically, making any text entry slow and unintuitive. For that reason, we quickly abandoned YouTube searches, although WD TV’s YouTube controls work well, and 720p videos looked great on our HDTV. Just don’t expect the WD TV to take low-res source videos and make them crystal clear on your 52-inch widescreen. We’re hoping that the streaming options will increase over time--Netflix and Hulu come to mind.
WD TV Live relies on a menu-driven navigation system via the included remote. We found the interface easy to use, but not without quirks--chief among them being that the dedicated Back button sometimes goes up a level, and other times you need to hit the left arrow to do the same thing.
Even with the added features, WD TV still stresses simplicity and ease of use. The menus themselves feel snappy and responsive. There are also file management capabilities built in, so you can delete already-viewed content or copy and move it between attached drives. It works, but for serious organizing, we still prefer to move files around in Finder on our Mac.
Plays back media in tons of common formats. Use your existing network to move media to and from the device. 1080p output. Access to online streaming content.
Navigation can be inconsistent. Onscreen keyboard is confusing and cumbersome. Media library doesn't consolidate all media.
stonee
August 16, 2010 at 11:50pm
I'v not been watching TV for six month. I get the information for internet by pc, although the content of internet maybe conveyed via different way to TV. I want DT attract me by DT Live Plus HD Media Player with interesting movies without dvd player, if they cann't why should we pay for it under the situation that you can enjoy every videos you can get in you pc, you know a video converter like ifunia is just $40, by the way, handbrake is even free.
jibran_pcc
April 18, 2010 at 1:09am
With the unit plugged into your home entertainment center, you can take all the videos, photos, and audio content you’ve got on your Mac and play them back on your television or home stereo. WD TV Live supports HDMI for full 1080p HD output, but you’ll have to buy your own cable for that. (The HDMI cables at your local big-box store are grossly overpriced. Find a local electronics shop or order online to find the same cables for 20 percent of what the big guys are charging.) There’s also a SPDIF optical audio out for users with high-end home theater rigs. The player doesn’t have any storage of its own, but you can plug in nearly any standard USB drive (including flash drives) that contain media.Your Net Biz
svane
December 11, 2009 at 2:28am
I have a WD TV LIVE attached to my V series Sony TV via HDMI. I attached an Apple airport base station as a wireless bridge to an airport extreme. I then attached a Windows home server to the network and downloaded 250 gigabytes of video to the server. The files play seamlessly over the network to the Sony TV. I then downloaded ORB to the home server and to my IMAC and can now play all the video files to my IPHONE. I then purchased a Slingbox and attached an Airport base station. After downloading the IPHONE app I can now watch live TV on the IPHONE or movies via the ORB app.I love how seamlessly Apple allowed my multimedia experience!!
johnnygsmith
December 08, 2009 at 9:04am
I just bought the TV LIVE and connected it to my 42" Vizio via HDMI. I also put a WD World Book II drive on my network and loaded all my videos and music into the shared folders of the drive. Once I connected the WD Live to my network, it immediately found the NAS drive and connected to it. In no time, I was watching HDTV versions of all the different tv shows and movies I have downloaded. I have as yet to have a network lag or any problems with any shows. The quality is AWESOME. I'm really excited about this addition to my home theatre system. Until now, I connected my computer by a VGA cable to the TV. The quality was okay, but this new system absolutely ROCKS and it was super-simple to connect.
