WD TV HD Media Player Review

There is a new product in town by Western Digital which is the HD Media Player. This jukebox is basically a little black box that allows you to transform (I just seem to love this word lately..) any of your USB drives be it thumb drives or USB hard drives (IDE or SATA) to stream out HD quality videos.

Oh ya, and it also comes bundled together with a small remote control as well....

The wonderful thing about this approximately 125.5mm x 100mm x 40mm black box is that is supports a brilliant range of video playback from MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC) including H.264 codec/X.264 encoder, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264) formats. I have been trying to find a DVD player that can support MKV format for some time and so this little gadget does the job just fine.

Device punya 'front-side' with a hdd beside

Device punya 'back-side

So last night when I reached home after work, I immediately yanked open the box containing this 303 gram dock, powered it up, plugged in my spare 2.5" 120GB IDE HDD, and connected it directly to my room TV using a HDMI cable (Am using a Samsung 32" Series 5 LCD, btw) to see the magic of this little device. Unfortunately I did not have any 1080p videos in hand so I had to settle with the best video file I could find - a copy of the *cough* downloaded *cough* Transformers 1 movie which is only 720p.

Ok, the speed for displaying the contents from my drive was pretty fast plus the output was superbly crisp and crystal clear. I had 2 partitions inside (both NTFS drives) and it managed to display both drives beautifully with the folder names intact. Scrolling was pretty smooth too but since my drive is only 120GB, not sure if it will lag had I used a 1TB drive instead.

The streaming video results were really nice. It did not give me any problems at all and I ended lying on the bed, enjoying the first half of the movie until my husband got home from tennis cringing at the sight of another new gadget I 'lovingly' brought home AGAIN. I told him it was just a testing unit and that I had not bought it just well...yet.... :)

Anyway, I also tried playing other dixv/xvid avi videos and again the results were satisfactory. I even tried playing a few episodes of Korean dramas with SRT subtitles (I had no SUB files to try so too bad, but do take note that this device supposedly supports SRT (UTF-8), SMI, SUB, ASS, SSA)

I even played around with the other features such as music playback using the few formats I could find in my stash - mp3, flac and aac. The only intermittent issue I kept facing was with the Photos/Images playback. Sometimes it can display nicely on the TV (although it was frigging frigging *repeat another 10 times* slow) but more often than not, it acted up on me by only displaying an empty black screen.

Initially I thought it could be due to the motherfucking huge size/resolution of the photos my husband keeps taking on his DSLR camera but even after I tried clicking on a few reasonably small re-sized files, it still failed to display properly. I mean the damn specs of the thing does state that it supposedly supports JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG yada yada... I dunno why, so please do not ask me because this feature is the least of all, a problem for me anyway *shrugs-off*

The few complains I have however, apart from the whacked photos/image display is that it does not support wired or wireless storage network over local area network or internet. It would be a huge plus point if it supported that sort of feature... Also if it had a certain storage built internally say a few hundred gigabytes would come in handy for me to directly transfer over some movies, either from an exernal drive OR over the network, sort of like using ftp or something... and now that, ladies and gentlemen would definitely come in very handy...

Overall, this product is pretty good, easy-to-use and absolutely hassle-free since its' like ultra small. The physical dimension for this advance jukebox is as below:

Height 1.57 Inches
Length 3.94 Inches
Width 4.94 Inches
Weight 0.67 Pounds

Price in the market currently is quite reasonable, around USD129.99 (around RM450.00 to Rm460.00) but latest news I just heard is that the price will be increasing very very soon...

:)




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