Thursday 11th December 2008WD TV HD Media Streamer

Lately I've been looking at improving my home theatre setup. With a new HDTV and camcorder, I wanted a media playback system that I could use to store and view HD videos that I have created. My original Xbox has been fulfilling this role, but it can't handle HD content.

I spent a while looking at Home Theatre PCs and similar setups, basically small computers. These offer advantages such as recording, easy network connection, and they can be expanded to do anything a computer can do (eg games). The main issue I had with these was price. A reasonable setup, with HDMI and full HD playback would end up costing over $1200. Add to the mix appearance and case size, and there was quite a lot I didn't like about the ideas.

A couple of weeks ago I decided that the ideal system would be a box that I could plug an external USB hard disk into, which would then stream the video straight from the disk. This week I stumbled across the Western Digital WDTV HD Media Player, and it seemed to be almost exactly what I was looking for.

This tiny little box (only slightly larger than a can of Coke) has two USB ports into which you can plug external hard disks, USB flash drives, hard disk camcorders and a number of other things. The WDTV then reads the drives, and can play video, music and photos on your TV.

The WDTV offers two methods to connect to your TV: Composite (the old red, white and yellow plugs) and HDMI. Composite will work with almost every TV out there, but only in standard definition. The HDMI connector allows playback in Full HD (1080i), and gives a great picture.

After using the WDTV for a night, I am quite impressed. It managed to playback all of the content I threw at it, though one XviD movie did require a bit of convincing (it told me it wasn't supported 3 times, then started working). The 720p .MKVs I tried worked flawlessly and looked great. I haven't yet tried any 1080p, or h.264 video, but from all reports these work just as well.

The user interface is simple, clean and easy to use. Unlike a lot of other systems, which tend to the flashy and overcomplicated, Western Digital has stuck with the basics, and I like it.

I did however come across a couple of issues. The remote control occasionally seems to get stuck, with the menu continually scrolling past though you're not pressing any buttons. This isn't actually a problem with the remote, as it can keep happening even after the batteries have been taken out. At other times, the remote doesn't seem to work at all. Online forums attribute this to IR interference, but that seems a bit odd to me, as I have used lots of other devices together without any problems. On the positive side, Western Digital has acknowledged these issues, and is working on a fix.

The only other issue I have is with the Media Library. When you first connect a drive, the WDTV scans through all the content, looking for Videos, Movies and Pictures. It then creates an index so you can browse these types "quickly". However, when browsing all the video content, for example, you are presented with a single list of everything, rather than an organised structure grouping like content.

Using the media library you can view most recently added content, which I guess is nice, but I find I prefer just browsing the folders on the drive like you would on a computer. Thankfully you can do this, and you can even switch the Media Library feature off to remove the other options.

The last issue I saw was with the default presentation of content. When first browsing, you are presented with 12 "thumbnails" of the videos, with the name of only the highlighted item being shown. This makes it difficult to go straight to a particular item, especially when all the thumbnails are the same, which is the case with videos or audio that don't have embedded thumbnails - which is most of them. Again, you can turn this off and view all the content in a list of names. This makes it a lot easier to find the content you are looking for.

These issues aside, and hopefully soon fixed, I love the WDTV, and would happily recommend one. I can see this is going to be an easy way to store and play our home videos. However, if you can wait until the first firmware update comes out, do so.

WD TV HD Media Streamer: NZ$290

Music - MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Photo - JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Video - MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)
Playlist - PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitles - SRT (UTF-8)