Amazon.com Price: $118.99 (as of 2010-03-12 05:29:44 GMT) Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon.com at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
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| Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player |
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| Manufacturer: Western Digital |
| Customer Rating: |
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| Sale Price: $118.99 |
| Availibility: Usually ships in 1-2 business days |
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| Buy Now |
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Product Description |
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Combined with a My Passport portable drive (sold separately), this player is the most convenient way to play HD movies or user-generated videos, listen to high-quality digital music and show high-resolution slideshows of your family photos on your TV. Also works with popular USB drives, and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices. Designed for My Passport, works with many other USB storage devices - Play content from most popular USB drives,and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices. Full HD video playback and navigation - up to 1080p - Experience the spectacular picture quality of HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio. Use the included remote control to navigate through your entertainment choices using our crisp, animated HD menus. Collect without limits - There's no limit to the size of your media collection; just add more USB drives for more space. Access two USB drives simultaneously - Two USB ports on the player let you connect two USB storage devices and access them simultaneously. Media Library feature aggregates the content on both drives into one list sorted by media type. HDMI and composite video connections - The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port lets you connect to the highest quality HDTV or home theater. Additional composite (RCA) outputs ensure compatibility with virtually all television sets. Hassle-free playback of HD movies, home videos, digital music, and photos on your TV
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Product Details |
- Thumbnail and list views - Browse your content by filename or by thumbnails of photos, album covers and movie cover art.
- Media Library - This unique feature lets you view all your media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives. You can view content by categories such as genre, album, artist and date. / Search - Search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename
- Create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music
- Movie viewing - Fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan; View subtitles - Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date
- Music - Fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat; Supported USB Device file systems: FAT-32, NTFS, HFS+ (no journaling)
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Video Reviews |
 No video reviews found for this product.
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Customer Reviews |
 H.264, MKV, 1080p fan |
| Review Date: June 27, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Robert Petkus, New York |
I love this product. Gone are the nights where I was the only person in the house capable of plugging the laptop to the HD TV with a 12ft miniDV<->HDMI cable and launching VLC -- dangling cords everywhere, draining batteries, and an inquisitive toddler.
What sub $100, 1.5"x5" device can you get that sips electricity, is whisper quiet, boots instantaneously, auto-indexes 500GB of media files on FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ in < 2 minutes, and plays almost every file format including H.264, MKV, WMV9, FLAC, OGG, and DTS? None.
Ages ago I used to rip divx and xvid movies onto a DVD and play them on a Philips DVD player. But now with huge HD file formats and oodles of cheap available external SATA USB storage I no longer have the patience to rip countless DVDs or encode movies such that I can play it on a BluRay player.
There are other options I considered: configuring a MythTV box (no time), hacking an AppleTV with VLC, XBMC or Boxee (AppleTV chokes on 1080p), Popcorn Hour (shoddy reviews), etc. This is by far the easiest for my family and I to use.
The system uses a Sigma SMP8635LF chipset. Sigma Designs is an American company based in California that makes system-on-a-chip (single integrated circuit) semiconductors for a vast array of media systems including 50% of all BluRay players on the market. This chip is responsible for decoding all the audio video codecs the Media Player supports. The chip handles 1080p fine with limitation (mentioned below).
The unit is not perfect but I still give it 5 stars because of the price and out-of-box simplicity:
Some issues (and some fixes):
- Doesn't stream content from the net (without effort). There are other cheap devices for this -- a Roku, for example. If you run out of HDMI ports get an HDMI switch.
- Initially had a problem with MKV with DTS audio not producing sound. The issue is that the unit can only decode in 2 channels and DTS has 5+ channels (depending on the variant). To-date the Media Player can't down-mix 5-channel to stereo. Resolution for me was output the DTS over the supplied optical port to my receiver (composite red-white cables won't work) and let the receiver handle the decoding. If this option is not available one could convert DTS to AC3 (a quick Google will yield easy recipes for both Mac, Windows, Linux users).
- Frames-per-second (fps). WD is clear about what the device can handle. These are the limitations for MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9:
1920x1080p at 24fps
1920x1080i at 30fps
1280x720p at 60fps
If you breach that then movies will pixelate and skip frames. Solution for me is to re-encode the movie using Handbrake at the max fps supported by the unit. For example, if I had a 1080p movie at 29.97 fps I would just reencode it at 24fps. Problem disappears.
- Thumbnail images. "Thumbnail mode" is more attractive and polished looking than "list mode" which simply lists the movie title. While it's relatively easy to embed images in, say, mp4 or avi, it is not possible with mkv. As such all my mkv movies initially had a lame default thumbnail assigned to them. Luckily the latest firmware addresses this. Place a jpeg image in the same directory and with the same name as the mkv file and the Media Player will display the thumbnail. I grab DVD cover art right from our friend Amazon. Works perfectly.
For example:
Defiance - 1080p.mkv
Defiance - 1080p.jpg
Other miscellaneous things I can think of:
- Works great with my Logitech Harmony remote.
- Handles (2) WD Passport drives with power over USB just fine.
- Plays BluRay streams perfectly - just copy the .m2ts file over to your usb drive and enjoy!
- To-date, chapter support is only available with MKV files. Adding chapters to a file can be accomplished using a tool such as MKVMerge. Otherwise, aside from fast-forwarding rates at 2/4/8/16x, it is possible to skip forward (not reverse) in 10-minute increments by first selecting fast-forward (>>) then skip (>>|).
- The unit has problems indexing HFS+ with journaling enabled (I have a Mac). It will still play the media but it's easy enough to turn off journaling. With the USB drive plugged into the Mac type:
$ sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/Your_Drive |
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