WD TV Live

It's not that fascinating by its nature; the standalone multimedia players or media tanks have been around for quite a while. Actually, long enough for some journalists to proclaim the end of the era. The end that will be difficult to reach with brand new models coming out all the time from all directions. Anyway, what is truly fascinating, is to find a standalone player that would be actually USEFUL. And I think I've actually found myself one. It was released quite recently, in October: Western Digital's WD TV Live.

If you're not familiar with the subject, a standalone media player connects to your TV and plays back digital video and audio content from different sources; some have embedded hard drive, some are network-enabled and can play files from your computer or Internet (YouTube, Web radio, etc), some support external USB media such as flash drives. They usually have no DVD slot, so it's not a complete replacement for a DVD player. But most are to playback the DVD contents.

My demands, as usually, are quite... hmm... demanding! I need something small, cheap and solid, yet versatile, reliable, fast and modern. I don't need Wi-Fi, but a network connection is mandatory. I love to watch movies in silence, and an internal hard drive or a fan would be an annoyance. I don't have a plasma panel, but HD content support is important - there's a lot of it out there already, and when I finally get myself a nice big flat screen, I want to be prepared to use it. One thing I got really fed up with is DTS - I don't have a set of 20 speakers surrounding me from all dimensions, and I will never have that in my home. God in his wisdom has given me only two ears and thus I prefer to watch films and programmes in stereo. DTS is always a pain in something that rhymes with it. Only a few standalone media players can (or licensed to) downmix it to stereo and send to my TV like normal audio. So... WD TV Live can do it all. And that is fascinating, isn't it. That tiny box supports any format and codec I can think of, from DivX to AVC, it can play DVDs and Blu-ray contents from a hard drive or network (so nice to have all films in one place), it can show YouTube videos (that should be fun), and it's $199 at Bestbuy.com. I'm game!

The previous model, WD TV, was well known for its openness to community and high frequency of firmware updates. There are some impressive customizations and modifications for it, which shows how inspiring this technology is for its users. And updates to the software were quite frequent. WD TV Live seems to continue the tradition, as on its community site there is already an announcement of a new firmware that adds some usability features and fixes a few bugs. So I can be sure it won't take years for problems to be solved, like it was with my current KiSS DP-500 player (which feels now like something that has died long ago and resurrects selectively only as a personal favor).

I always download user manuals before buying things - that helps to see if all really is as that good as it looks in the ads. And it seems there are just a few things I'm going to miss. One grain of salt I want to mention is the inability to jump into a specific place in the video file by specifying the exact time. WD TV Live has a skip feature that skips 10 minutes on each button press... that's not exactly the same thing, but should do the trick. I hope rewind and fast forward work well on MPEG-4 files, but I saw no complaints about it on the web.

So, I guess I found myself a perfect match! I'll publish more once I get my hands on it.