» Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: I have to convert everything? Oh Man!!!! =[
Comment: I mean oh man whats the point of having to convert everything I have for this? I purchased this because I have several WD Passport Elites to store my files, music & video. I saw this & thought wow I could just plugin my externals straight to my 32" Philips LCD, cool! Then it says I dont have anything. I read the instructions or whatever & says I have to convert everything, what a bummer. So I will have to buy more externals to keep the converted content? oh man sounds like it will take forever to convert all my stuff plus the cost of externals for this. My apartment is small I will just connect my laptop to my lcd tv thru the hdmi connection. This thing is going back. It has alot of potential. If they update the software I will repurchase in the future. Right now though I have enough things frustrating me.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very nice but not perfect
Comment: So far, we really like this. We've loaded more than 30 hours of captured video from our digital camcorder, thousands of photos, and thousands of songs and are enjoying them all on this. The inferface is easy, it recognized the 1TB USB drive we connected with no problem, and it's small and unobtrusive near the TV.
My 2 complaints are:
It supports AVI but apparently not DVI AVI. We've used Windows Movie Maker 2 to capture 30+ hours of DVI AVI from our camcorder and unfortunately, it wouldn't play them directly. Fortunately, it was easy to convert them all to MPEG with Nero.
Complaint #2: Installing the included conversion software caused all of my other video capture software to stop working properly, and even uninstalling it doesn't fix it. I had hoped to use it to batch convert large numbers of videos but it's really caused me headaches. If you do video capture from any kind of digital camcorder, I wouldn't recommend installing the included software. If you have a solution that already works, don't risk breaking it.
All in all, we're very happy with this.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: media player
Comment: given as a gift to our son. He loves how it stores all of the video's for the 2 children.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost Perfect
Comment: Just needs to add support for some 6 channel audio encodes used in HD video, ac3 etc.

Would also be nice if it could transfer files from usb1 & usb2 so you could use a thumb drive to add files to a connected external drive.

Plays most everything I throw at it (have had to re-encode some audio).

If you have a lot of media files, the WD HD is a must.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Works well.. but you will need the firmware update.
Comment: [...]

Upon opening the box, I was surprised at how small the unit was. It is dwarfed by the Vantec HD dock as you can see in my test setup. Out of the box I had some trouble playing one .SRT subtitle file, and the subtitles started at the top of the bottom third of the screen. Also if there were more than one line to the subtitle the lines were spaced very far apart. Very distracting.

Imediately I checked the Western Digital website for a firmware update. Indeed there was. Ver. 1.01.02 dated 12/2/08. After updating the problems I was haver were fixed. The subtitle that wouldn't play worked perfectly. And, the subtitles were at the bottom where they should be and the line spacing was corrected. I also noticed some additions to the setup menu, including subtitle size.

So far all the files I have tested work fine, including the .mkv's which I really wanted this unit for. I am very pleased with the operation and menu system. The only improvement that I can see so far is that they need to give an option to change the subtitle color. The only option right now is white, which can be hard to read on bright scenes. The option of yellow would be very nice. Of course hardsubbed video subtitles look great.

WD also offers GPL code for third party developers, which I find awesome. (Sony please take a hint.)

I'll give it 4 stars only because it needs subtitle color options. I am sure this will happen in future firmware updates.

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