Western Digital WD TV HD 1080P Media Player
Manufacturer: Western DigitalList Price: $129.99
Street Price:
Amazon.com: $115.00
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 List Price: $129.99 Street Price: Amazon.com: $115.00 Today we take a look at the Western Digital WD TV HD Media player. The WD TV HD Media Player is a device about the size of an external hard drive that plays A/V content from USB storage media. The WD TV HD Media player is optimized for the WD "My Passport" line of hard drives but it will work with other USB devices (we'll discuss this later). The player supports 1080p for content and menus navigation. Features
File Formats Supported
Notes: - MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9 supports up to 1920x1080p 24fps, 1920x1080i 30fps, 1280x720p 60fps resolution SetupSetup was trivial. There is no network support so setup consisted of connecting power, HDMI, and plugging in an external hard drive. There are also composite connections available nor SDTVs. The player is actually setup for HDTV as default. So many devices are setup to be 4:3 right out of the box. PerformanceThe WD TV HD Media Player worked quite well. The menus were more polished than we expected. They looked good displayed on a 65 inch 1080p TV. Navigation was simple and intuitive. Once a drive is plugged in the media player scans it for content and organizes it by type. You don't have to go hunting for photos, music or video. You can even search for a file by name. We attached a universal card reader, an iPod, and an external Western Digital Hard Drive. All three were recognized. The iPod had limited functionality; it was attached just for fun. The device is optimized for Western Digital's "My Passport" line of drives and supports FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ (no journaling) file formats. But we found no issues with any drive we attached to it. The WD TV HD Media player does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes® Store, Cinema Now, Movielink®, Amazon Unbox™, and Vongo®. Nor will it decode Dolby Digital beyond two channel. But what it does do is playback pretty much any video you can throw at it. Ara has been busy converting his VHS Library to mpeg4 and found that the media player not only played the video but did a good job of upconverting it to 1080p. If you have listened to the podcast for a while you know that Ara has an HD Homerun and can record OTA HDTV programs on his computer. These programs are both 1080i and 720p and contain Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. For this evaluation a few recordings were copied to the WD Hard Drive which was then connected to the media player. They were immediately recognized and made available via the player. The looked beautiful when displayed on the TV and while the sound was not 5.1 it did sound clear. The only real complaint we have about the player is that it does not support Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Music playback is just as easy. Copy mp3 or AAC files to the hard drive and you are good to go. The Album art is even displayed in the GUI. The player comes with a nicely laid out remote control. It's small and does not have a ton of buttons. ConclusionAra was fully anticipating selling the player after he was done with the review. However, due to its tiny size and ease of transport, he now sees it as a great device for travel. And yes, Western Digital got it right by making it a perfect complement to the "My Passport" line of hard drives. Posted by The HT Guys, April 15, 2009 12:00 PM Reader Commentary Hi. Your review makes it sound like it's limited to Stereo, and can't do multichannel at all. I realize that there's no internal DD5.1 decoder internal to the unit, but so what? If you plug a TosLink cable from the unit into a Receiver, don't you get full multichannel sounds that way? If not, then why not, because all it should have to do is pull the bits from the bitstream and feed them to the receiver. This is confusing. Thanks! - Tim... Hi Tim, You are correct! If the file is encoded with a Dolby Digital sound track the receiver will do the decoding and thus you will get 5.1 audio. When we did the original review we thought our test material had a 5.1 sound track. It did not and what made us a bit more confused was the following statement by WD: AAC/Dolby Digital decodes in 2 channel output only. That statement combined with the fact that we could only get two channel audio out of it led us to believe that the device was down mixing to two channels. We subsequently found that out test material was improperly encoded. We later reran the tests with a properly encoded xvid file and sure enough our receiver found a 5.1 audio track. Our website was updated to reflect this. The issue here is that the review was given to HDTV Magazine quite sometime ago and it had the errant information. When I was asked to approve the final write-up this fact slipped past me. I hope this post clear... Ara, thanks very much for confirming my thoughts, clearing this up here, and revising your website. With this caveat lifted, I think that makes the WD player an even more attractive option. - Tim... I have my WD Media Player plugged in using a Fiber TosLink cable from the unit into a Receiver; in the system settings you can change it from Stereo to Digital. I recently had a .mp4 H264 AAC movie hi bit rate but for some reason the sound did not work; however, I switch the system to stereo and the file played fine....sure not in 5.1 but at least it worked. I loved this little box and it plays most formats... Bob... Several premium channels, such as 5-Star Max, Cinemax, and HBO-S have been discreetly showing a lot of the Universal monster cannon in hd in the past few months. (all of the Karloff Frankenstein films; the 2 best Wolfman films, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Incredible Schrinking Man, etc.) Does anyone know if that studio will ever re-release these, perhaps as a big box in Blu Ray? Some 20th Century Fox classic titles in early Technicolor have also surfaced in hd, but are often not flagged as such in program logs. It seems, when the film is not in a 16x9 ratio, the program description shows standard def, even though the picture is true 1080i hd.... Wow! Purchased this device a while ago and run into the articles about on-screen interface customizing. I've spend several days toying with it and the result turned out to be awesome as for me. Using the special software called 'Movienizer', it's the movie cataloger program, I've created a catalog for my movies with covers, info and other graphic stuff like this: http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/5158/picture11i.th.jpg Has someone tried to modify WDTV's interface? I'd like to discuss this subject if it would be interesting for you.... More from The HT Guys
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