Western Digital TV HD 1080P Media Player

I was very wary of this with it having a 'Western Digital' badge on it. I had the 'LG' thing in mind - they were once great when they made just televisions, but then they branched out and slap their name on all sorts of rubbish. Absolutely not so with the WD TV though - this thing is every bit as good as WD drives are reliable... Not just that, but this device fills a small gap that I had been waiting for.

I got myself a 40" Samsung 1080P back in October, but for a few weeks it was going to waste on standard def TV, so I decided to invest in a media player, and with the price and features of this, it was a clear winner - at least on paper. Having used it for a month or two now, I cannot praise it enough, especially after the recent firmware update which appears to solve pretty much every bug it used to have, as well as introduce some new features and codec support, so it's good to see WD are keen to support this wonder device of theirs.

Now, onto the important stuff... Has played every single DivX and XviD file I have thrown at it - 100% success. Has played about 90-95% of all 1080P MKV x264's that I have fed it too. Now, the biggest downfall of this device is the fact that it does not support DTS audio which is a pretty common format for 1080P x264's that you'll find on various 'sources'. If you connect the WD TV to a home cinema with a DTS decoder then you'll be fine, otherwise you'll need to transcode the DTS audio into AC3, which will play fine. The process should take about 15min to an hour on a modern computer with free software... The bundled conversion software that WD give you may do the job too, but I religiously dont touch anything developed by Arcsoft so could not say for sure.

Video quality is absolutely fantastic though... Obviously though if you feed this thing standard def DivX's, you wont notice much difference because the WD TV does not 'upscale' it to make it appear of higher quality by filling in 'blanks', so to get the full potential you need to play 720 or 1080P files, and trust me one again - the quality you will get on a full HD TV is absolutely superb - way better than streaming WMV's from PC to Xbox 360.

Besides the DTS support, the only negative things I can say about WD TV is the remote is very basic - but it does the job so it's really just a minor niggle I have. The other thing is the menu/GUI is a little sluggish (not painfully so, but enough to be a slight annoyance). The other thing about the GUI is it seems to be optimised for standard definition or 720P displays, as it seems a bit low quality and pixelated on my full hd display... But your going to spend your time watching movies - not the menus, so again this is a very minor flaw.

I bought the Iomega Screenplay TV Link and used it once because the picture quality was so poor and it wouldnt play tv shows/films from the USB memory key without resetting the unit every 5-10 minutes so i sold that and looked for a suitable replacement. I found some reviews on this device and thought i would give it a go as it was only £12 more expensive than the Iomega, i wish i had bought this one first! This is leagues above the Iomega, if it was 3x the price it would be worth it, VERY easy to use and set up, the picture quality is outstanding and the sound is awesome! I have watched avi, mkv (720p) Divx and ripped dvds (iso) files on it so far and i am very impressed, it outputs dolby digital through hdmi as well as optical.
it also has 2 usb inputs and you can select which one you want (or both), the menus are very easy to navigate and give you all the options you need, the remote is small but does everything it needs to. As others have said, it needs an update to turn off the power on the external hard drive when you shut off the unit and then it would be pretty much perfect. If you do not unplug the hard drive it remembers where you are on each song/tv show/film and gives you the option of resuming from where you left off.
I am very impressed with this device, get one!!

I personally did not know products like this even existed until a little less than 2 weeks ago.

After reading some information regarding this product I didn't know what to expect really, because there are products on the market that end up being more hassle than they are worth with all the variations of codecs and containers used these days for media. And with media converter software included in the package I had my suspicions that this would be one of those products to avoid buying, but I was wrong.

My previous device for playback before this was a PS3 and XBOX 360 console, which had huge limitations on what they accepted for playback.

I ended up having to convert some media simply for it to be recognized to playback through these systems. So naturally when I came across this device I looked into it with great interest and searched for some early reviews, I was pleasantly surprised by peoples analysis of this product. They tested a range of media, at different resolutions, bitrates, codecs and the media player ended up playing them all back flawlessly. This then was a selling point for me, so I then placed an order.

I received my product and it was very simple to setup, literally within 5 minutes of unpacking the contents I had it setup, configured to my liking and was playing back my media on my home theater system. Lucky for me I had a few HDMI cables lying around, which in my opinion should be supplied in the package, but unfortunately isn't.

Now if you are like me and you store almost all of your media on external storage then this will be something you should look into purchasing. As I have a couple of 1TB external storage devices packed to the brim with media, this product even works well with an apple iPod with disk use enabled, played back 720p trailers no problem so great for on the move without taking bulky hard drives with you, media ranges on my storage from photo albums, music archives, movie and game trailers, TV shows to movie backups and some HD mkv content. And upon plugging these devices into this media player, I was pleased to see that the WD TV Media Player recognized my drives using an HFS+ filing system and FAT32 on my iPod, and the device played back almost everything I had stored on them.

Now depending on how large the capacity your external storage devices have, and how full they are, the archiving prcoess when you first start this device up may take a while. The first thing I noticed when I started browsing my media was the horrible thumbnail view mode, which in my case had no thumbnail images to any media, so the first thing I did was go and change some system settings to list all media as they are stored on the drives, in the corresponding folders, which I recommend everyone does.

Now there are some good points and bad points with this device, good points being it plays back almost everything, it is very small and easily concealed within your home theater system setup. It has a simple sleek design and interface, runs quietly and the included remote is very handy, it has a resume feature and it is portable for on the move.

Some bad points being, it seems to be doing some unnecessary processing / adjusting on the way to the TV, the device does sometimes get very warm, to on the verge of hot. It doesn't have any chapter features, thus you have to resort to fast forward and rewind which I personally found it had difficulty doing at high rates (x16) mainly, so hopefully you do not have a lot of very lenghty content to get through.

So overall it is an affordable media solution, it isn't the best on the market, but it does the job it was built for with little effort, for a whole range of different media you have stored away. Enjoy.