Western Digital WDTV Live HD Media Player Comments

Great review (as always).

Just wondering about its noise levels. Does this get noisy and hot at all?

I wish i'd waited to buy this unit over the Xtreamer that I got a couple of month ago. If anyone's considering the Xtreamer, i'd advise against it until they get their firmware v2 out of beta and actually get the unit working smoothly on the networking side. Also the internet integration is plagued with bugs and is poorly implemented.

If the FW is sorted out then it's a worthy competitor to this WD effort.

This WD unit looks like it has a much more polished UI and I have no doubt that it's probably a lot quieter in operation than the Xtreamer. (v.noisy fan)

The one feature everyone was wanting was.... what????
What about DTS audio? Every single person i know who has a mark 1 device wants DTS decoding! -That- is the newly included codec which makes the mark 2 better, not some rubbishy Real Media whatever!

The device is completely silent - no moving parts at all, and it's rated to over 70°C, which it doesn;t hit even when playing very high bitrate files (60MB/s. While the Xstreamer does come with a fan, you can turn it off though with no discernible difference in playback.

MSIC is spot on here Ed - no one cares about realmedia (who else but BBC radio still uses it anyway?) - it's the DTS support that's awesome here, especially the extra offering of automatic 2.0 DTS downmix for those of us without awesome pimptacular 5.1 setups.

The WDTV Live also has improved HD file support in regard to the number of reference frames in a file. On the original if a file had too many it just wouldn't play - now it doesn't matter how many reference frames there are in HD media - they just play.

Add those improvements to the new networking capabilites and this is surely a superior offering than the WDTV?

Can anyone actually find the Asus one anywhere? Last time I looked it was either impossible to search for due to the bloody stupid name (yes, Asus literally deserve to be punished by losing sales over the silly name), or everywhere seemed to be out of stock, or still expecting stock in.

Plus, if you do happen to find it anywhere, by the time you factor in delivery, it's less than a £10 difference, if that.

WD wins.

@everyone: I recently bought the original WDTV - mainly to play mkv files. It seems to be happy to play audio and video on most of my mkv files (tv shows) but my larger film files only play the video.

Does anyone know if the new wdtv will play the audio files on these films because of the DTS decoding (or am i getting the wrong end of the stick)? Also - i'm waiting for my Onkyo TX-SR507 amp to come. Will this be able to play the audio seeing as i'm connecting the wdtv to this and then into my tv?

I've got another week in which i can return it and was wondering if it's worth spending the extra £30 on this version (i'm not really bothered about the network connection).

Any thoughts/comments would be much appreciated :)

I agree with MSIC and Harry, DTS decoding and network support was the only thing lacking on the WDTV (never encountered a RM whatever myself). They hit the jackpot with the WDTV and this improvement will keep brand loyalty and positive word of mouth going.

I will be picking one up for xmas, just need to decide to give the old one as a present or keep it as a spare.

@Nick, yes, the film files would most likely to be DTS so the WDTV won't play the audio. If you plug it into the Onkyo through hdmi it will work fine, just set your WDTV audio ouput to digital.

It now seems that the WD TV Live is in short supply. I got mine from Scan but they're out of stock. The only place I've seen with stock is Amazon, but they're selling it for £157.

The only reason I went for the WD TV Live over the Asus O!Play, was for the better interface, and more options when dealing with files (e.g. being able to delete them off shares and ext. HD).

@Andy: I don't want to come across as needlessly argumentative in every topic I post under on TR, so I'll keep this short:

The only site not covered by the statement I made in my previous post is CCL: http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?id=35289
and even then they state "Stock: 10 in 2-3 days". I'm somewhat sceptical as to the accuracy of this statement. Finally, their estimated £3.52 delivery charge is likely their Royal Mail price, so it'll probably cost more to have it delivered in reasonable time.

Over to you :).

@ drdark

We (CCL) had 5x of the O!Plays in stock a couple of weeks ago but they sold out. We're waiting on further stocks at the moment - should be 4-6 weeks apparantly. Maybe just in time for Christmas? :(

Correct, £3.52 cost is for Royal Mail.. City-Link postage doesn't cost much more though.

@Mik3yB: Thanks for the info.
I've actually already got one of the original WDTV models, but back when I was looking even then the O!Play seemed to be in short supply. Anyway, hope the information helped somebody.

@Pbryanw: Yes, I noticed the WD TV Live was in a similar situation too at the moment, however just wanted to note that the £157 price on Amazon is actually a marketplace seller.
In fact if you glace to the right: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Internet-Streamer-Television/dp/B002LZUHMI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1256834294&sr=8-1
,you'll find Amazon are selling it for £99.99 but it's due in 2 to 3 weeks (same price they have for the O!Play which is due in 1to3months...)

Amazon are selling this @£157! A quick Google reveals scan selling it at or around £100. Keep Googling guys! The O!Play looks like a descent piece of kit, but the interface is a deal killer, the WDTV Live's in comparison looks like a nice update to the previous model. I hope these improvements filter down to the older model via a firmware update.

Anyone know if this is realistic expectation?

Why no wifi? In this day an age I can only see it as an omission. Very disappointed. Maybe version 3.0 will not disappoint. Here's STILL hoping.

*Gives up*

@HDRE - You can buy a USB wi-fi adaptor for the WDTV Live but, like you said, this will probably be incorporated into the device by the next version.

And Scan are currently out of stock of the WDTV Live, as mentioned earlier. It seems most of these media players are selling like hotcakes.

@Pbryanw: You can buy a USB wi-fi adaptor for the WDTV Live but, like you said, this will probably be incorporated into the device by the next version.

Personally I'd find it pointless, every device I've used that incorporates wireless just doesn't have bandwidth for HD, or in a lot of cases even SD. Eg, my Aspire Revo has built in wireless but it's useless, better option is a set of HomePlugs and be done with it, especially when there so cheap now, eg. you can a set of 85Mps homeplugs for less than £50.

Also I tend to think wireless has been a victim of it's own success. Eg, when I first got a wireless router I was the only person down our street with one, reception was great, but now with nearly 15+ people nearby with wireless it has no chance of giving a decent reception.

More likely they'll make a new version called Wdtv superlive2 or something and add all the things there.
They still haven't fixed all the problems from the original WDTV nor really added features.
Unless they do i'm not buying anything from them anymore

@Nick:

The WDTV Live will play video files with DTS audio though TV set speakers, you do not necessarily need a DTS decoder as the WDTV Live downmixes DTS to stereo if you don't use the optical out.