Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player is missing two components commonly found in digital media players: a display and storage. What the device does have is two USB ports, HDMI and composite video outputs, digital and analog audio outputs, and the ability to play almost any digital media.
Since you provide the storage media, you can never fill up the WD TV. You plug the player into your TV and connect your USB drive or digital camera to the player; it then creates thumbnails for all the digital movies, photographs, and music it finds stored there. If you connect storage devices to both USB ports, the WD TV will index the contents of both drives as if they were one.
The device delivers much higher video resolution than most media players, all the way from 480i using the composite video port to 1080p using HDMI (576p, 720i, 720p, and 1080i are also supported via HDMI). The WD TV supports a host of video formats, codecs, and containers, including AVI, H.264, QuickTime, VOB, and Matroska. It does not, however, support DivX.
The player supports most digital photo formats, including BMP, TIFF, PNG, and GIF at resolutions up to 2048x2048; JPEG is supported at resolutions up to 4096x4096. Video quality via HDMI is excellent. High-res photos stored on the 250GB WD Passport drive we used took an average of 3.7 seconds to appear on the screen, which is plenty fast for slideshows, but the device’s browser software is ploddingly slow about generating thumbnails. And while it can play slideshows while simultaneously streaming music, you can’t queue up the music and start both at the same time.
Speaking of music, the WD TV supports almost all the popular file and container formats, including AAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg, and WAV. We do wish, however, that it supported WMA Lossless. The player displays album art and artist, album, and track name information stored in id3 tags, but it doesn’t inform you about the codec and bitrate used to encode the track. And it’s a good thing the player has an optical S/PDIF output, because it has an atrociously bad DAC.
The WD TV is a ripper-friendly solution for anyone who doesn’t have an HTPC, media-center extender, or other type of media streamer—and doesn’t want one. It’s also useful for taking media on the go (provided there’s something to connect it to when you get there).
Supports a host of popular media formats, codecs, and containers.
Awful DAC; doesn’t support DivX, WMA Lossless, or any encrypted media.
Roman2025
April 27, 2011 at 8:43am
Even though the device doesn't have networking built right in. There is a sizable hacking community that has developed. 1st and 2nd generation devices can have hacked firmware installed and you can add support for wireless USB network adapters or wired usb adapters if you prefer. I have all of the files and very clear walkthroughs available at my website: http://romanstechhelp.blogspot.com for anyone that is interested. And yes this is me promoting my website but I have never had a single person complain about it because it is one of the best free resources available on the web for these devices. I hope it helps some folks :)
Cheers,
Roman
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Cash
April 24, 2009 at 8:53am
Are people seriously complaing about no networking for a devixce that costs $100?
And boo hoo it doesn't support Divx extensions, only .avi. You gotta be Kidding me! Feel free to let us all know what device it is that you have from a respectable manufacturer that has all the featurs of this product, plus the others that you want.
daphatty
April 03, 2009 at 11:08pm
I've played countless Divx and Xvid files with my WD TV. As long as they are in .avi format they will play just fine.
As for the lack of a network port, I too was disappointed by this omission but after thinking it through, the decision actually makes good business sense. WD wants you to buy more hard drives, preferably theirs. Frankly, my sneaker net solution works just fine and the HDMI output more than makes up for the lack of a dedicated NIC. I plan to use Handbrake to convert my DVDs and (eventually) Blu-rays into digital files for playback on the WD TV.
Thanks Western Digital!
OvenFresh
March 28, 2009 at 12:17am
This may be the only review I've seen that says it does not support DIVX. Better double check Mike.
Shalbatana
March 27, 2009 at 10:52am
When you say "supports", do you mean "naitively"?
I bought a creative zen because it "supported" a bunch of great codecs, including MPEG-4.
But to play mpeg-4 the software needs to convert it upon import. That to me means that the software provided supports Mpeg-4, not the player.
I've been stung by this more than once. It's a practice that has to stop.
(p.s. I won't even go into the fact that some of the other "supported" codecs have massive sync issues, which, it seems, are being ignored by the manufacturer.)
If this thing works as advertised (and price is reasonable). I want one yesterday.
_______________________________
"There's no time like the future."
jeff.petersen
March 27, 2009 at 10:14am
It supports divx and xvid .AVI files, just not .DIVX extensions.
I have one, and it works great with Handbrake encoded .M4V files, but the major difficulty is no .WMV support.
KaylaKaze
March 27, 2009 at 9:35am
The lack of LAN connection with UPNP really hurts this, IMO. And the lack of DivX (and I assume Xvid) support is just plain stupid.
spentnickles
March 28, 2009 at 2:46pm
I second your comment... I've been looking at media extenders for some time now. I have a HUGE collection of DVD's ripped in MP4 format, but am currently using my PS3, X360, and computers to stream... If this thing had a built in LAN port, I'd pick one up in a second... Because it doesn't, I'm looking at other options. Come on Western Digital, why do you let us down?
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