Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Product Information

Technical Details

Brand	Western Digital
Item Weight	304 g
Product Dimensions	125 x 40 cm
Batteries:	1 Nonstandard Battery batteries required.
Item model number	WDBAAP0000NBK-EESN
Number of Ethernet Ports	1

Additional Information

ASIN	B002LZUHMI
Best Sellers Rank	9,677 in Computers & Accessories (See top 100) #45 in Electronics > Hi-Fi & Home Audio > Media Streaming Devices > Streaming Clients
Shipping Weight	898 g
Date First Available	16 Sep 2009

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Product Description

WD TV Live - Play a world of HD media on your TV
HD video, photos and music - they're on your computer, on your USB drives, on the Internet, but how do you enjoy them on your TV? Now it's easy - play a world of full-HD, 1080p media on your big screen TV with the WD TV Live network-ready HD media player.

Full-HD 1080p video playback and navigation
This is the real thing; full-HD 1080p playback. Sit back and enjoy the spectacular picture quality of brilliant high definition video and the crystal-clear sound of digital audio. Use the included remote control to make your entertainment choices using our crisp, animated navigation menus. WD TV Live also supports a wide variety of the most popular file formats, meaning there's no need to spend time transcoding. Supported file formats include AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS and WMV9 for video, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP and PNG for images, MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG and Dolby Digital DTS for audio, SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB and SMI subtitle formats as well as PLS, M3U and WPL playlist formats.

Connect to your home network or the Internet
with full-HD 1080p resolution and support for
a variety of popular file formats. View larger.

Play videos, music and photos from the Internet on your big screen TV
Explore and watch YouTube videos and Flickr pictures on the big screen, rock out to thousands of radio stations via Live365 and discover new music with Pandora radio. WD TV Live supports a list of popular online services that delivers Internet content onto your HD TV, including YouTube to broadcast yourself on the World's #1 video sharing website, and Pandora – free, personalised Internet radio playing only the music you love. Enter your favourite songs or artists and enjoy stations created just for you. Rate songs as they play, because Pandora caters to your tastes and adapts stations to your feedback on the spot. There's also Flickr to share your photos and Live365, which lets you listen to thousands of commercial-free Internet radio stations. Live365 has broadcasts from Radio Disney, Santana, David Byrne, Pat Metheny, and Paul Oakenfold, as well as stations created by music lovers just like you.

Access files anywhere on your home network
Play movies, music, and photos from any PC or drive on your home network. The Ethernet port connects this player to your home network through a wired connection or via popular, supported WiFi adapters (sold separately), and is ideal for use with WD's My Book World. You can play content from most popular USB drives, digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognised as mass storage devices, and compatibility is optimised for My Passport portable hard drives. There's no limit to the size of your media collection; just add more USB drives for more space. Plus, with two USB ports on the player you can connect multiple USB storage devices and access them simultaneously. Our media library feature even collects the content on all the drives into one list sorted by media type.

Transfer and play files from your home network
or the Internet on your HD TV. View larger.

Get connected with a simple, intuitive user interface
Using the included remote control you can navigate smoothly through your entertainment choices using the DVD-like navigation, which also supports video chapters, track modes and subtitles. There's a HDMI port that lets you connect to the highest quality HD TV or home theatre, plus additional composite (RCA), and component outputs to ensure compatibility with virtually all television sets. The optical audio output sends digital signals to your AV receiver for the best surround sound experience, and there's also support for wireless network connection with optional USB wireless adapter.

Advanced navigation
Advanced navigation in the form of thumbnail, list and video previews also helps you to browse your content by file name or by thumbnails of photos, album covers and movie cover art. You can even preview videos while you browse your content. The Media Library function enables you to view all your media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders, or simply use the search function to search for your media by filename.

Photo viewing and music playback
The WD TV Live Media Player lets you view your photos in a number of ways. You can create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music, or you can view group all media by type within one menu, regardless of its location in folders. The photo viewer supports zoom and pan functionality, with music playback including the usual fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle and repeat controls.

Manufacturer's Description

Connect to your home network or the Internet
with full-HD 1080p resolution and support for
a variety of popular file formats. View larger.

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

127 of 128 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A few nerdish notes 25 Aug 2010

By M. Beddow

Amazon Verified Purchase

There are plenty of reviews here already to assure people that this is an excellent little device that does what it claims to do very well. So I'm writing this to raise a few points that will probably only be of interest to people who want to know what the limits of this device are, rather than how it performs for current mainstream consumers. So this is a review aimed at the nerdishly inclined.

My firmware is the latest currently (August 2010) available. I am feeding the box over 100 Mb/s cat 5e ethernet from a mix of servers including Linux boxes running Samba and NFS devices from WD and Buffalo, as well as playing files from a Seagate 500Gb portable hard disk attached to the USB port. I have also tried linking it to my home LAN via a Devolo 200AV mains-borne link, with results I'll say more about in a moment.

1) The only thing that may impact on mainstream users is that it can be a bit picky about mp3s. I haven't kept an exact count, but I reckon it has refused to play around 2% of my collection with the message that the file is of an "unsupported type". This is easily enough fixed by decoding and recoding the file: all the problem ones have been made playable this way. The odd thing is, I can't find any common feature in the files it rejected. They were from a big variety of sources, produced by different encoders at several different bitrates, and they all checked out fine using the standard mp3 checking utilities.

2) On video files, it performs faultlessly on divX, Xvid and H264-encoded files at 720p and below as well as on DVD material, both from USB attached media and over the Devolo (nominally 200Mb/s but in reality much slower) mains-borne ethernet link. However, it can't magically force more bandwidth across a network that is actually available, which means that, as expected, 1080i mpeg-2 recordings of raw (Korean) HDTV transport streams will not play smoothly over the mains-wiring LAN. I haven't tried with a WiFi adapter, but I would expect the same results as with the Devolo with such bandwidth-hungry material. However, across a properly wired 100Mb/s ethernet link, even these demanding mpeg-2 videos play flawlessly.

This means that anyone hoping to play such HDTV transport-stream files, or even more demanding ones from blu-ray sources, across a LAN that doesn't have conventional wiring, will need to move them first to a directly-attached storage device on one of the USB ports. Since the WD box client lets you pull files across the network to attached storage, or indeed push them there from a PC anywhere on your LAN, this is easy enough to do as and when needed, though it can of course take twenty minutes or more to move the huge files across in this way before they can be played But this is a limitation of the LAN infrastructure, not the device itself.

3) The network client in the WD box will not follow remote shortcuts (or Linux symlinks packaged as Windows-type shortcuts by Samba) Any shortcuts on a remote share are listed, but attempts to descend into them and access files result in a "No video/audio files in this folder" message, showing that the client does not know what to do with a shortcut. This is unlikely to be a problem for most people. I only hit it because I like to organize my material in a fairly deep hierarchy of folders, then make subcollections accessible via shortcuts/symlinks in a top-level directory. That approach simply won't work with the WD box. You have to navigate to your content using the native paths. Presumably WD could fix this with a firmware upgrade if they chose to.

4) The player's network client is also fussy about connecting to password-protected Samba shares, such as nearly all NAS devices use. It behaves as Vista and Windows 7 do out of the box, meaning that password protected shares on XP-era devices like older Buffalo NAS drives can't be accessed. So if you have an NAS device that would't allow secured access from Vista or Windows 7 until you applied a fix (actually a registry tweak) from the supplier of the NAS so that your Windows behaves like XP or earlier when authenticating to Samba, then the WD box will not be able to access any password-secured shares on that device. Whereas a user can easily modify their OS to make such connections, only WD could fix this issue via a firmware update. If you have such a device, you will need to take the password protection off the shares it contains and make them available to the guest user without password before the WD device will access them.

5) As others have commented, a major boost to this device (and one that would find it a place in a lot more British households) would be to incorporate a client for the BBC Iplayer and similar services from other UK broadcasters. But I guess WD thinks the UK market is too insignificant to bother doing that.

6) Of the existing built-in clients for Internet services, the only one I've tried to any extent is for YouTube. I don't really see the point of blowing up YouTube videos (even YT's notion of High Quality ones) to TV screen dimensions, but for people who do want that, it works well enough. Searching for material is a bit hit-and-miss, mainly because so many YT users don't tag their upload sensibly, and the WD search interface makes it tricky to input searches and weed out the results you actually want from the long list of hits. However, the client does let you use your YT profile settings by logging in to your YT account, and by adjusting those you can control to some extent the selection and ordering of results (e.g. by country or language in the "most viewed" etc categories).

7) Another nice feature, though of strictly minority interest, is that the box allows you to choose one non-Latin character set to support additionally in filenames, alongside the default Unicode. This means that if you have filenames containing non-Latin characters or exotic accents, you can see those names correctly listed. (Tip: if you have files named in all three major East Asian languages, choose "Korean". That way you'll see enough of the Hanzi or Kanji in Chinese or Japanese filenames to figure out what the files are, while getting full Hangeul support).

8) To judge from other reviews here, people's mileage varies where attempts to play ISO images of DVDs is concerned. The docs don't claim that this is possible, and my personal experience with the current firmware confirms that it isn't.

All in all, this little box has been better value for money and a lot more fun than any other bit of hardware I've bought recently. I thoroughly recommend it.

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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Could this be the perfect media player? 19 Nov 2009

By Romek

I just got this product, and have to say it does EVERYTHING right. I plugged it in, made some small adjustments on the settings (like picture resolution, digital audio, subtitles off by default, etc) and so far I'm very impressed. I did notice that as soon as I plugged it in there was a firmware update which I did. Everything went smooth and without any issues. Now in regards to some of the issues others have identified reviewing this product... if you have shared drives on the network with video content (as I do) and if you use Windows Vista/7 trying to access them. The login security issues are 100% windows related. This player is not at fault for MS changing the shared drive access permissions and making it more difficult for external devices to see and access your shared drives. My XP computer (with many shared drives) worked the first time, no issue at all.
Also I have to say that the HD content works SO well... very smooth video, no jumping, no issues. I am extremely happy with this product and highly recommend it!
One thing I hope they add in future firmware updates is the ability to jump forward in a movie 3-5 minutes at a time instead of just fast forward x2,x4,x8. This jumping works so well in XBMC and I wish all media players would adopt it.

BTW, not only does this player have HDMI and Composite out, but it also has Component as well!!!! Which ended up working best for my setup.

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543 of 560 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Works great: Windows 7, NAS, Wired and Wireless 14 Dec 2009

By Colin Fraser

I've read a few reviews where some people have had problems with the WD Live TV device. I have to say I've had no issues whatsoever and thought it might be useful to share my setup to give people confidence to try this amazing little box.

Here are the steps I went through to get everything working.

1. WD Live TV device: Firstly I installed firmware version 1.01.11 (There is/was a version 1.01.12 but this has problems so I would stick with 1.01.11 for now). When I first got my device I went to the Western Digital website and downloaded the firmware onto a USB stick. Once I had the device attached to the TV I plugged the USB stick into the device and it immediately popped up on the TV that a new version of firmware had been found and let me install it. I would recommend doing the first firmware update this way, even before hooking up the network connection.

2. The WDTV device is very fast at detecting where media is. I did my first test by copying a few photos, music tracks and a film onto a USB stick and plugging it in to the device. When I went into the Photo menu I could select the USB stick and display the photos, likewise with the film and music. Okay so far so good - time to network.

3. My ultimate plan was to go wireless, but I like to keep things simple to start with so I switched off my WDTV device then plugged a wired network connection (i.e. Cat 5 network cable) into the network port on the back of it, and the other end into one of the network ports on the back of my Internet Router (Netgear WGR614). This might not be practical for some people due to the length of cable that you would need. My WDTV is only about 10 feet from my router, if its not possible you might have to go straight to wireless (outlined below). This is where things get slightly techie. You need to check your WDTV device is getting allocated an IP address by your router. Once you have both ends of the network cable plugged in, switch on your WDTV box and then use the menu to go into Settings and the Network and choose to Check Network. Fingers crossed the device should show you an IP address and Gateway (your routers IP address) and DNS servers. These are all allocated by the router. You need the IP address for accessing local media (i.e. on your computer). The gateway and DNS are required for accessing YouTube and the like over the Internet. If you have all these allocated - great! If not, you need to do a bit of trouble shooting. There can be various reasons but they pretty much all come down to how your router is configured for allocating IP addresses. Checking the DHCP configuration on your router is the first thing, also check anything that would not allow the WDTV device to connect, such as an access list.

4. Okay lets assume you now have a network connection and IP address etc. If you select the Video option you should now be able to select YouTube. See if you can stream a YouTube video. Pretty cool, eh! If its not working double check the network settings are correct especially DNS and the gateway. These should match the ones set in your router.

5. Okay so you can connect to the Internet, but how about all your local media - photos, music etc. Well you need to ensure they are shared. The WDTV box will detect PCs on your network and let you find media on them. I'm running Windows 7 on my home network but Vista and XP should all work fine too. I'm not going to go into all the details of how to do this but you need to make sure the folders on the computer that contains the media are shared. If you right click on a folder containing your media you will see the option to set up Sharing. Make sure you have done this for every folder you want to access from the WDTV device. Tip: Put all you media in folders called Music, Films, Photos etc and place all in a folder called something like Media, then set the Sharing on the Media folder and everything below it will automatically be shared. With Windows 7 there are other options for media streaming which you could explore also.

6. Right, once the sharing is setup on your PC you can go to the WDTV device and it should now be giving the option of Shared Folders under the Photo, Video etc menus. You should now be able to play and listen to your photos, films and music. There are two final steps, both optional, to complete your setup.

7. Going wireless. This took me all of 30 seconds! I used a Buffalo Airstation Nfiniti Wireless-N Ultra Compact USB adapter (The Western Digital website has a list of tested USB wireless adapters). Switch off the WDTV device, unplug the wired connection to the router and pop the Wireless USB adapter into one of the USB ports on the device. When you switch back on, go into Settings, Network and it will ask you if you want wired or wireless. Select wireless and the box will then search for a wireless network. Obviously you need to be able to pick up your wireless network from where the box is located, but assuming this is the case and you have your wireless enabled on your router you should be able to browse the network just as you did when you were wired. Depending on the security on your wireless router you will probably be asked to enter the encryption passcode that you setup when you first configured your wireless network. Techie Tip: You should use WPA encryption if your router allows it. WEP is much less secure. If you have no security setup you should get it enabled immediately otherwise everything you just shared on your PC can be accessed by anyone within range of your wireless network. Not good!

8. So that's it. Sit back and enough streaming your media to your TV......Oh there is one last thing you could think about. I can't be bothered having to switch on my PC every time I want to view photos or listen to music etc. This is where you could consider getting a NAS box. I have a Buffalo Linkstation with a 300GB disk. I've put all my media onto this and setup to share on the network. The WDTV device finds the shares on the Linkstation just as if they were shares on a PC.

So there you go. I hope that gives you confidence that the WD Live TV device is capable of doing what you need it to do. Yes, if you are unfamiliar with the basics of networks you may need to do a bit more work if you encounter a problem but I have to say it does work very well and worth it. I'm looking forward to what other Internet services Western Digital might add in the future. Enjoy!

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