The digital media player WDTV Live, described in this post, is now for some time being used in my home, and I think I got enough experience with it to share it here. And since I think there's enough of advertisement to praise the positive sides, I'll skip directly to the faults and problems. The main of them is its overall software flimsiness, a sign of modern age of software development. When you pause the video and switch an audio track - it might stop the playback. When you rewind and press "play" to stop the rewind, it shows that it is paused, but keeps rewinding. You have to press play again a few times. The font size is too small in all the menus, it's really hard to read. The lack of "search" or "jump" feature disturbs a lot, as this box doesn't let you go to a specific time in a media file. The "remembering" feature works only until you plug the thing out from electricity - as if there is no such thing as flash memory. So you have to fast forward a movie to the place you stopped, as if it's a video tape player, and not a digital device. And another thing is audio quality, which is somewhat poor, comparing to my previous device (KiSS DP-500). Video quality on low-bandwidth files is poor as well.
However, the rest of the features are working great. Automatic update is brilliant, and WDTV Live really does play anything you give it. Only once it refused to play a WMV (Windows Media) file I had. And lack of APE format support is a bit inconvenient, as I'm using it often for my CDs. I'm also planning to try a non-official firmware for external DVD drive support, and will post here the results.
