Western Digital must think they have something special with the WD TV HD Media Player to enter this market so late. The WD TV HD reportable plays back up to 1080p media files off an attached USB thumb drive or USB HDD. No word on wether the supplied software supports popular HD file formats like MKV or if you must re-encode source material into an Western Digital approved codec. It might be wise to wait until the early adaptors play with the device before you plop down $129 of your hard earned cash though.
Designed for WD’s My Passport portable drives, it also plays content from WD My Book® family of drives and most popular USB drives, digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices;
Full HD video playback and navigation – up to 1080p – to experience the spectacular picture quality of
HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio;
Remote control to navigate through entertainment choices using the crisp, animated HD menus;
Dock and play convenience: just plug in a My Passport drive or other USB storage device with HD content to play it on a TV or home entertainment system;
Collect without limits by adding more USB drives for more accessible content;
Advanced navigation options such as thumbnail and list views; WD’s Media Library™ feature lets users view all media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives; ability to search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename;
Photo viewing features to create custom slides shows; ability zoom and pan; search photos by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;
Movie viewing with ability to fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan, view subtitles and search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;
Music playback with fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat and search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date;
Two USB ports on the player connects up to two USB mass storage devices and access them simultaneously while the Media Library feature aggregates the content on both drives into one list sorted by media type;
High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI®) port connects to the highest quality HDTV or home theater; additional composite (RCA) outputs ensure compatibility with virtually all television sets;
Free ArcSoft MediaConverter™ 2.5 software to easily convert photo, video, and music files into formats optimized for use on the WD TV HD Media Player;
Ultra-compact design that fits easily into a home entertainment center; and,
1-year limited warranty.
I wonder if it will work well with their MyBook external drives.
I have 2 1TB MyBooks which I use in rotation on my iStarHD 1.3 media player. Otherwise very good, the MyBook’s love to hibernate. That causes problems because the iStar seems to have trouble waking them so I occasionally have to coldstart the system. (I’m using the eSATA interfaces.)
Maybe the WD box won’t have that problem.
The problem is with the drives, there should be a config program to keep them from switching to low power.
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.
Update! The MG-M2TV is a turning out to be a great player! Looks like Mediagate just released a Korean language firmware too for the MG-M2TV. found the link on xpcgear.com http://www.xpcgear.com/mediagate-mg-m2tv-korean-rmvb-player-hdmi.html
do they make one with component outputs instead of composite?