"Get your family and friends together, sit back, and enjoy! Whether it's your own videos, music, and photos or Internet entertainment, with the WD TV Live Hub media center you can enjoy it all in the comfort of your living room in brilliant high-definition. Put your personal media on the high-capacity built-in hard drive and stream it to any screen in the house...Watch popular movies and TV episodes instantly - Don't wait for the mailman to deliver your movies and don't settle for streaming to your small computer screen. Access Blockbuster On Demand® or your Netflix® unlimited membership and watch TV episodes and movies on your big screen."
It seems like everybody is in the media-streaming-set-top-box business, and this is Western Digital's new product. It supports Netflix and Blockbuster On Demand, which is pretty standard. What's also standard is a crummy user interface - but looking at this video below, it looks like Western Digital may have finally moved beyond the DOS-like directory listing I've seen on their previous products.
Curious how this new product compares with previous offerings from Western Digital - they have a chart for that. I'm not very familiar with Western Digital's media players, but if that comparison chart is correct, the previous version didn't pull metadata for media files - that's really old school. Glad to see the new one is smart enough to do that! The list of supported formats is fairly broad, but without ISO support, it's not something that interests me very much. Is ISO support important to you, or do you rip your DVDs and don't need it?
We've requested one for review, so fingers crossed, we'll be bringing you some hands-on experience with the product soon!
Lack of ISO support is surprising to me--and a little suspect. The older, little brother (WD TV Live Plus) does support ISO format, and it isn't listed. So perhaps this is simply an omission on the supported formats list.
I hope the interface to the Live Plus gets a facelift, too. It most certainly sucks wind right now. I mean it's functional and even my wife can use it (with some coaching sometimes), but it is UGLY and disorganized. The new one actually looks pleasant.
Nevertheless, I don't think I'd buy another WD media product. BAD support. Slow updates. Very bad history of supporting older models with newer features (like I'm sure this new interface). And NO WiFi built in (even in this new model). HDMI also doesn't work with my TV.
Great feature set. Bad final product from a user experience perspective.
Western Digital Introduces WD TV Live Hub Media Center With 1 TB Storage
Linear Mode
