WD TV Live first impressions
Back in the days when the first DVD players were introduced, I was employed by Europe’s biggest audio-visual facilitator. So naturally, we dove right in, and I even worked on the menus for a few major movie releases. I remember being blown away by how hours of great image quality could fit onto such a small disc. But recently, those same discs have started to really annoy me. They scratch, they’re easy to misplace and they take up a lot of space if you’ve got many. That’s why I’d been looking at the latest generation of network media players. I got one this weekend for the person in my household who has the most DVDs, my six year old daughter 
.
Western Digital original WD TV player was intended as a companion device to the company’s storage products. It plugged into your TV and into an external hard drive allowing your to instantly play all the media files on the disc. But what I really wanted was to be able to rip and store all our DVDs in a central place, and play them back over the network. That’s why I decided to go with the newer WD TV Live, which also has a (wired) network adapter and works with certain USB wifi solutions.
I’m not going to do an in-depth review of this tiny little box, mainly because I don’t have it hooked up to a full HD TV set, and because testing these kind of players is a lot of work. Dutch website hardware.info did an extensive review and found the TD TV Live to play just about every file in their extensive collection of exotic codecs and file types.
The unboxing part wasn’t as much fun as I hoped it would be, because the first unit I got turned out to be DOA. The second one worked, but wouldn’t accept an older wifi dongle I had lying around. I was kind of expecting that to happen, but it did mean going to the local computer store a third time, to get a network adapter. And even that took two trips, because the first one, a powerline adapter, wouldn’t work with my network (no issue with the WD). I ended up with a Linksys WUSB600N, which I knew to be compatible. The combo worked instantly, and wireless was a breeze to set up.
My initial impressions are very good. One of the reasons why I got this box, and not the competing product from my favorite brand, the Asus O!Play, is that WD has done a great job with the menus. They’re highly optimized for d-pad operation (up, down, left, right) and visual enough for my daughter to use. She’s just started learning to read, so icons and cover images work better than text for her.
I have yet to set up a central media server, but playing files from network shares works perfectly. So does YouTube (although I’ll have to look into parental control a bit), and everything else I’ve tried. This thing simply does what it’s supposed to, and I love how you can use it with an older CRT television to play SD content and eventually move to HD when that aging Trinitron finally gives in.
This is the personal blog of Roy Tanck, designer, geek, entrepreneur and WordPress enthusiast. It's also the home of projects like 
Nice in Tanzania with Safari and Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar.
Looking for some way to remove the date from my static pages, i.e,...
Booked a taxi for the family (2 adults, 2 infants), 3 weeks in advance. On the day the taxi...
My two cents are as thus: Linux is the absolute perfect platform for...
Wow this got a bad wrap when first released, i stayed away from it even know there...
Hi Roy Partly in response to Alans question on 06 Oct...
Greetings! In Russian works, only there is one but… The cloud turns a...
Its going to be some time before I can justify buying an iPad. Like when they add a...
roytanck (813):
So you can just rip all your DVD’s and play them? that’s so great, i have a friend which has tons of movies and dreamed for something like this for a long long time, how many GB/TB can it store?
Comment by Alvi Halderman — November 25, 2009 @ 7:49 pm
Interesting. I got one of these a week ago and have mixed feelings.
The D-Link USB 150wireless adapter that is meant to be compatible gave me problems by causing the player to continuously reboot 30 seconds after startup. I finally fixed it by racing through the menus and configuring the wireless connection manually before a reboot! WD customer support finally responded with no solution and only an email telling me that they were taking my problem for future consideration! Now set up and working, it still takes three to four minutes from start-up to connect to my wireless network despite an excellent signal strength.
Despite the problems I am very happy with it’s performance. The menus ARE pretty AND functional which is rare to see particularly at this price point. The additional bonus was that it with such a simple menu structure, it was very easy to program the functions onto my Logitech Harmony remote so I didn’t have to add another remote control to the collection!
Comment by Westie — December 1, 2009 @ 3:43 am
Hi Westie. Since writing this post I’ve replaced the wireless adapter with a powerline one. The wifi signal isn’t great in the room the WD is in, and movies would stop half way through and never resume. Later, they wouldn’t even start. It was starting to seem as if it would only work on good days. Powerline gives me around 80 mbit with no hickups or anything.
I’d recommend not using wifi with this box. Streaming video is hard work, and my guess is most USB adapters just aren’t built to deal with this much data. The WUSB600N would get really hot, and a Sitecom one I have gets even hotter, to the point where you can’t touch the metal bits.
Comment by Roy — December 1, 2009 @ 10:38 am
I have had two 500GB WD hard drives fail on me in less than a year. They just stopped reading the content and started clicking. When I asked them for assistance they had none for the purchases I made were done on a discontinued model apparently. WD was very unhelpful and I now keep my backups that are still WD turned off when not in use. I used the Hard Drives for backing up video production files, losing two in the past year was very costly. I guess my point is WD hard drives seem to be wonky, and I would not recommend them for anything.
Comment by Skip Bensley — December 1, 2009 @ 9:11 pm
I’m inclined to agree about not using wifi if you can avoid it – although that was the feature that sold it to me as I did not want to go to the trouble of installing wiring and jackpoints. I’ve been trying both wired and wifi connections and the wired connection is far more simple to set up and (perhaps obviously) faster to connect. I must admit that the wifi has performed well for me once connected to my network – no issues like you have experienced.
Comment by Westie — December 3, 2009 @ 1:55 am
It seems doing a full reset (unplugging the power for 10 sec or so) fixes many networking issues. Apparently experimenting with wifi left some settings in the box that needed to be erased for wired networking to work reliably. It’s worked great since doing that (forgot to mention this in my earlier comment).
Comment by Roy — December 10, 2009 @ 11:57 am
Nice post, i have alot of movies collection, i had need such a thing, what is the price borther??
Comment by Asfand Mudassir — December 27, 2009 @ 4:52 am
I have a Mac, I love the wd tv live and I haven’t even connected to my home network… and therein lies the problem. Are you aware of any powerline networking adapters that will work with macintosh?
Comment by Bryan — January 18, 2010 @ 8:24 am
Bryan, they should all work with Macs. The configuration utilities may not, but all the ones I’ve had worked fine without changing the defaults. Since the signal will (in all likelihood) not leave your home’s power grid security is only a minor issue anyway, and the password the only thing you can change.
Comment by Roy — January 21, 2010 @ 9:41 am
Have you tried connecting WD TV Live using a Wireless Adapter? Not a wireless router? Did you use a LAN to USB converter? Wooooooot…
I’m really wondering why my wireless USB adapter didn’t work.
I think I need to use another wireless router and plug it in my WD TV Live.
I also tried Airport Express, but I can’t make it work as a Wireless Adapter. T___T
Comment by jehzlau — January 25, 2010 @ 9:36 pm
And oh, how did you plugged the Linksys WUSB600N? Did you plug it in the USB port? Or in the LAN port using a converter? *confused*
Comment by jehzlau — January 25, 2010 @ 9:37 pm
Jehzlau, you can plug a certain number of USB wifi adapters directly into on of the WD’s USB ports. There’s a link in the post to a list of compatible adapters. Unfortunately, you’ll need excellent reception to be able to stream movies. It didn’t work well enough for me, so I switched to powerline/wired.
Comment by Roy — January 26, 2010 @ 11:15 am
@Roy – ohh.. so I’ll plug it in the USB port, instead of the LAN port.. Wooooooot! I’ve tried it but it didn’t work.
I also bought a converted. USB to LAN, but it still didn’t work. Anyway, I did what you did and do the wiring thing. Thanks for answering my question Roy, even if you’re a busy man. ^___^
Comment by jehzlau — February 13, 2010 @ 7:18 pm