We still miss our now-defunct local video store, but yes, Netflix movies beamed right to our TV is a pretty fair trade. And if Netflix streaming hasn’t found its way to your TV yet via a game console, Blu-ray player, or TiVo, the WD TV Live Plus (the fourth iteration in Western Digital’s line of home media players) makes a great purchase. After all, who doesn’t want to pipe their digital videos, music, and photos to their existing TV and stereo these days? If that’s a superpower your living room lacks, the Live Plus can be your radioactive spider with minimal hassle and none of that messy biting.
At 3.94x4.94x1.57 inches, the petite WD TV Live Plus is the same size as its predecessor (the WD TV Live), and hooking it to your entertainment center is as easy as plugging in a few cables. An HDMI or component port connects it to your HDTV for awesome hi-def video, while a composite A/V out and a Toslink audio out talk to your receiver. Add in a USB drive full of media and an Ethernet connection for streaming media from network-connected media shares, and you’re off.
Using the bundled remote, the Live Plus’s interface is perfect for navigating from couch distance. The headlining new feature is support for Netflix streaming. And unlike many Netflix-compatible devices, this one lets you actually add items to your Instant Queue from the device itself. But don’t get too happy just yet. While you can browse several category lists on the Live Plus--New Arrivals, and various genre lists, for example--there’s no way to search Netflix for specific content, so you’ll still need to head to a Mac (or any number of iPhone apps) to do real queue management.
But like setting up the WD TV Live Plus itself, activating the box on a Netflix account is a simple affair--we were watching Die Hard 2: Die Harder in no time (yes, voluntarily). The Live Plus delivers another serious upgrade, too. Along with the alphabet soup of audio and video file formats already supported by WD TV hardware, it now supports DVD navigation. So rather than converting all your discs to folders of menuless, flat files, you can now use the Live Plus to easily navigate disc images, including special features and extra content. It mirrors the experience of playing back the original discs themselves, and travelers, cinephiles, and parents of disc-destroying toddlers will appreciate this extra flexibility--especially its added benefit of eliminating time you’d otherwise spend transcoding video files to whatever digital format your player of choice requires.
We would’ve liked to have seen full Netflix search capabilities, but the Live Plus’s streaming works great, and its support for DVD navigation makes it feasible to set one up as the hub of your digital film library.
WD TV Live Plus
COMPANY: Western Digital
CONTACT: www.wdc.com
PRICE: $149.99
REQUIREMENTS: TV with HDMI, Composite, or Component input
Simplest way to get video files from Mac to TV. Supports a huge range of audio and video formats.
Netflix feature lets you browse predefined lists, but there’s no search capability.
