Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

I was very skeptical after reading the capabilities for such a small box and not being a Western Digital fan. The reviews I read were positive and the price for the claims was excellent so I bought it.

PROS:
I works exactly as advertised and it is great to find a product that does that. I used the HDMI output port from the rear of the WD TV directly to my audio video receiver. I then connected 2 USB external hard drives the input ports. One 1TB and 1 500GB drive. These drives have TV shows, movies, photos, and MP3's. All played correctly with out any problems. Quality through the HDMI at 720P was excellent on my Samsung 42" HDTV.

As you well know if the menu system isn't good, trying to find what you want on a terabyte hard drive could be a daunting task. Not a problem with this media player. ICONS represent each item with text below each made understanding what and where you are easy. If you have many items such as I do, it will take a bit to navigate through all the folders to find your selected item.

CONS: Actually there weren't any real cons. It takes the WD TV a while on first start up to index your hard drive. After that time from turn on to playing your selected title is acceptable.

NOTES: I have a Logitech Harmony remote and it works well with this media player. I recommend this as an addition to any home theater or media center.

This baby even will play .m2ts files (avchd) ! Fantastic !

Basically has all the advantages of a PS3 media playback without actually buying a full ps3 . Just plug you portable hard drive or mem stick in and play. The PS3 is the only other media player I know that can playback raw m2ts files like this ..... thumbs up western digital!

This device is exactly what I was looking for.

I was using the xbox 360 for video streaming from my computer, but I have a laptop, and it wasn't especially convenient to always have the laptop plugged in and connected to an external hard drive when you wanted to watch a movie...

I now have a player for all of my ripped movies and home videos that doesn't steal bandwidth from my router and is dead-simple to operate.

I just plugged it into my external hard drive, plugged in the HDMI cable to my TV and that's all the setup there was. It plays HD .AVI and .MP4 with no weirdness. Smooth, instant playback on extremely high-bitrate video files.

I currently have a Lacie 1TB drive hooked up to it, but it's nice to know that I still have a free USB port, for when I'd like to add another drive.

My friend bought one as well and was having problems with jerky fast-forwarding of .m4a files (which is a non-standard .mp4 container created by Apple). After installing the new firmware update and trying a few things, he found the solution... just rename the file, so that the extension is .mp4 instead of .m4a and then the fast-forwarding worked perfectly on the same files. I just thought I'd include that, in case any one else encounters that problem.

Other than that, I highly recommend the WD HD Media Player if you have a decent sized collection of videos, and you'd like to watch them without having to worry about having a computer around.

This is a great unit for playback of MOST video files. It has played all 720p MKVs I've thrown at it with the exception of DTS-encoded audio - it just gives an error about the unrecognized audio format. It will still play the file, but with no audio. All AC3 encoded files play fine, however.

Although the box advertises full 1080p, that's a bit of sleight-of-hand: the unit indeed does output a 1080p signal, but it can't play a standard 1080p MKV without some pretty heavy graphical glitches. The fine print on the box says 1080p at 30fps (as opposed to 60fps for 720p) - this probably has something to do with it.

In any case, it plays all your standard WMV and AVI files just fine. It has a barebones but very usable 10-foot interface. Rewind and fast forward worked better than I expected.

Overall, this is a great way to share video files with your less tech-savvy friends or relatives. More hardcore types will probably want something with network access, as unhooking the hard drive and loading it up periodically can get old.

I ordered this device through Amazon and received it the following day (Buy.com was the merchant), so I was very happy with the quick shipping. I bought this after having used an original Xbox with XBMC (Xbox Media Center) for the past couple of years. My main reasons for buying it were the fact that it's very compact, silent (as compared to the noisy Xbox), and plays high bitrate HD content perfectly.

So far I'm very happy with it despite some major missing features. The lack of a network connection drastically reduces the convenience by forcing you to disconnect your USB hard drive to copy stuff onto it and reconnect. With the Xbox I could stream from a network hard drive and therefore I could copy newly downloaded or encoded content to the shared location straight from my computer without physically disconnecting or moving anything. Devices like the Popcorn Hour offer a network connection and other features the WD TV HD lacks, but they cost more and aren't so small.

I love the tiny size of this device because I can easily unplug it and move it to another room, or even take it on a vacation. In situations like that the analog video and audio outputs are a key feature because I can connect to almost any TV.

Compatibility with files is not as good as the XBMC. It plays about 90% of the content I've collected, whereas the XBMC will play almost 100%. It does better with newer codecs and high bitrates, and has more compatibility problems with old WMV or AVI files. That said, the device runs much faster and looks amazing when playing HD content. Looks as good as my Samsung Blu-ray player when playing Blu-ray rips.

I'd love to see more UI features and better codec support added (the firmware is still version 1.0). The UI is attractive and easy to use, but very bare-bones. I'd like a way to jump forward or back in a longer video without having to FF or rewind, a way to copy files from one connect USB device to another, and many other features that WD is hopefully working on.