Ignorant me, I don't even know what 'lossless' is, so imagine how happy I was when I found I could buy a cable for a measly $12 that would connect my VISTA laptop to my hdtv (vga-to-vga connectors). The website had pics to help the uneducated figure out what they need, and their customer service confirmed that I didn't need to pay $100 to watch my avi files on telly.
Note: Apparently the key (sometimes missed) with this method is that the computer uses presentation mode.

I might opt for the WD TV box to free up my computer in the evenings, but I have absolutely no problem watching anything my computer can play. Picture's gorgeous, sound never fails me.

Alternatively, I might buy another laptop to stash next to the tv, with a bigger hard drive next time.

Thanks for the tremendous work you did with this review.

It's true this is a very good player for the money though it does have buggy issues as many have reported. Too bad western digital has not released a firmware version yet to fix these problems. once they do this will be a hard to beat player since it can do ALMOST everything you would want it to do. Seems there are two types now: with and w/o hard drive. those with HDD like the Mediagate or Popcorn hour are a good choice. those w/o hard drives like the WD TV, IOMEGA Screenplay are good too but you have to attach some sort of external usb storage anyway. So choose wisely. If you are looking for something that may be better than the WD TV, search for this: "Mediagate MG-M2TV". this is the newest player from Mediagate which can do everything the WD TV can but actually supports more formats like RMVB (real video) for many Asian videos. so this is one item i'm really looking forward to. hoping the reviews are good on this one.

By chance do you know if one can stop in the middle of a movie video file and pick up again at that spot at a later time?

If so, does such work with more than one file, so that a number of movies can be watched over time?

Thanks,
Nicholas

Ok, you do realize that you must now review the Popcorn hour A-110 as it is currently the undisputed king in HD media playback, right ? ;)

Great review btw. I like this digital turn that TR is taking. Keep it up gang.

Adi

This beastie must be the ultimate Digital Player (Googlenglish warning):

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2F....fujicables.com%2Fproinfo.php%3Fid%3D55&sl=zh-CN...[.com]

The name FujiCables does not exactly inspire confidence, but they use the same SMP8635 chip from SigmaDesigns. Both companies probably just chopped some bits off a reference design, stuck it in a box, and created some custom skins for the reference software UI...

The chip appears to have Ethernet integrated (possibly including the PHY) so it's a shame WD did not make use of it.

http://www.sigmadesigns.com/public/Products/SMP8630/pdf_files/SMP86...

Well I just picked it up for 123.99$ CND at tigerdirect.ca. I'm really anxious to try thing. I really want to get it hooked up to my network using usb ethernet. Looks like fun to tinker with.

Here is Europe it sells for 110€, its fantastic it can really play a lot Formats, btw i bought it for my Car and bought also an 9" Screen for arround 90€ so i have now the best media system in my Car using all Speakers from the car and one cool and power saving WD HD Device (1,5A at 12V isn't a lot!).

Any links to the modified firmware for USB-ethernet dongles?

Too bad these are still in the $150 range in Canada (ncix). Still a nice deal though.

Wouldn't the WD TV also make a great music server? Rip your CDs to FLACC, which is a lossless format, and acces your tunes via the WD TV inferface, & create playlists for your mood! Given the size of todays harddrives, it sure beats paying THOUSANDS for a music server. This one has a remote & a GUI as good as any.
I am going to buy one next paycheck! This time I got an Onkyo TX-SR606 that has 4 HDMI inputs to do all my a/v switching & send the signal to my HDTV. Also have FIOS box- HDMI and Toshiba HD-DVD player with HDMI. I guess I will have to bite the bullet & get a BluRay player, but still waiting for prices of Players & Discs to drop.
I think I will rip all my home videos to my external hard drive too, to easily have access to stuff that is currently a pain. I don't want to keep burning home video DVD's that take a lot of time. Just edit & save as AVI, then copy to external HD! I'll also check the quality to see if saving as MPEG looks good to save space. What a great toy to kill any free time I have!

Thanks for the review!

I wish WD would make a big sister product with the missing features. I'd love to have an integrated SATA drive and wifi.

Here in Canada prices are closer to 200$, so I'm waiting, like a lion hiding in the bushes, to jump on any sale of the device.

i'm very disappointed in the WD TV player. i bought two to play hundreds of educational videos i have on an external hard drive.

about 1/3 of the videos play without sound on the WDTV.

they play perfectly on any PC and they are pretty "average" video files (avi, MP3 sound, ~100MB files, 640x480). i tried the files on both of the players i bought, and they wouldn't play correctly on either one.

i contacted WD tech support and even sent them a 1MB sample file that plays on a PC but won't play on the WDTV and they basically said, tough luck.

i was so annoyed i threw the damn things away, when i should have sold them on ebay instead. i'm more upset that their specs are dishonest and their tech support was so dismissive than i am that the thing didn't work. i won't be buying any WD products for a long time, and will never buy any of their media player products.

With networking this would be so nice (yes I read the hacked firmware bit.) One other thing to consider versus a media extender like and xBox, PS3 or HTPC (ok, the last can get pricy) is the requirement to have add-on storage. Sure you could constantly transport what you want to watch or listen to from a PC to this device on a thumb drive but I imagine lots of folks would just want it set up with their media library permanently. If you were to get an external drive for this thing you're looking at xBox-like total cost and not much less than a budget HTPC.

Also there are some looming products that might be a lot more flexible than this. NV Ion platform, with Atom or Nano, would be a tough competitior. The conclusion places this thing neatly: an inexpensive alternative especially for those who are a little less tech-savvy, or for those who are tech-savvy and just want the most simple solution.

The Lego Rebel Trooper looks scared. Could it be that he knows Imperial Stormtroopers are about to burst out of the WD TV HD Media Player?

Personally, the lack of intergrated HDD is an attractive feature.

a) It makes the unit smaller
b) It ensures it is silent
c) I can pick whichever HDD I want to pair it with

but most importantly, if I want to watch something on the TV I can simply put it in a USB stick and plug it in. I don't collect stuff so I wouldn't care about having 20-30 or more videos always available.
Furthermore, 16GB (or higher) USB sticks are common nowadays and depending on the format, you can get a lot of video in that.

This would be a really great device if it had 802.11n or wired Ethernet and functioned as a dnla device. As it stands, the need to augment it with additional devices to get any use out of it lowers the product's value considerably.

Still, the price is attractive, and combined with a decent sized flash drive and sneakernet, I could see this being very useful.

Strange article. Am I right in that it assumes you know that the input is external storage? Doesn't seem to spell that out... :/

Couldn't you connect this directly to your pc via the USB cable somehow?

I'm confused about capacity. It doesn't have a built in hard drive?

However, after two minutes with a knife and screwdriver, I had full access to the WD TV's naughty bits. (Note: that was not a dating tip.)

ahahahahaha

You could have better taste in movies, like include a picture of Ratatouille instead. No pun intended.

when oh when are the manufacturers ever going to allow mounting ISO DVD images?!? i find this to be the biggest problem of all these media players as well as software front-ends such as windows media center, beyondTV, media portal, etc. i just don't get it...

I own one of these, they are pretty sweet and versatile. Yes everyone says the popcorn hour is better, but I'm not too lazy adverse to the hard work walking to my office requires to change files on it... which I probably do once a week.

I don't have a 1080p TV but there was (is still?) talk on the avs-forums that 1080p files with too many reference frames would cause some nasty stutters/pixelation problems. Supposedly this uses the same chipset as the popcorn hour which can play the above files fine so the guys there said it might just be a firmware problem. I haven't followed that thread in a long time though.

I'd love to see a comparison between this and the Popcorn Hour A-100 (I have 2 of them). The Popcorn Hour does everything this WD does, plus it has wired networking and 2 USB ports via which you can add wireless networking. It is about $50 more than the WD.

From what I can see the WD's interface appears more polished, but the Popcorn Hour is quite usable. Also the Popcorn Hour does not include a hard drive, but you can install one internally (the A-100 uses PATA, the A-110 uses SATA but is more expensive).

Before I recommend something I always consider first whether it is something I can teach my mother or father to use, I think the Popcorn Hour is brilliant for my purposes (I use it with a NAS), but my father or mother would never be able to use it.

Add the networking and eSATA and I'd pay $200 for it, no problem. Maybe a future higher-end version? One can hope...

I will stick with using XBMC on my original Xbox.

Does this exist: an external HDD with Wi-Fi and USB? If it does, and assuming that you can use both USB and WiFi at the same, paired with this WD TV it would be awesome.

:-D

The lack of network makes this really painful. How are you going to get media on the device? Unplug the hard drive that is connected to it, plug that into a computer, copy media to the drive, unplug from computer, plug it back into the device? That's alot of work.

That said, my xbox does what I need to. Between native playback and the Media Center Extender functionality, it plays back anything I'd want it to.

The product brochure (http://www.sigmadesigns.com/public/Products/SMP8630/pdf_files/SMP8630_br.pdf) shows that this is targetted at BluRay players, so the fact that it can play 40mbps BluRay files is no surprise.

What is, is that a device with a 300MHz MIPS CPU (Playstation 2-esque) with the right hardware video acceleration support can whip the arses off of other solutions with far far faster CPUs. I think this shows that upcoming ARM based netbooks with video decode acceleration may whip faster x86 solutions that don't have that.

Nice review, but I think the lack of integrated networking kills it for me.

If you don't mind me linking it, I found a thread elsewhere where a bunch of other questions and issues were brought up, and a WD rep was answering a lot of them.

http://forums.macworld.com/message/674839

Hopefully this helps those interested.

I may have missed it. Would a USB DVD ROM work in the USB port?
XBOX360 HD-DVD for exemple.