Western Digital WDTV Live

Media Players seem to be the next best thing these days. Soon our entire rack of DVDs will be obsolete, what with one terabyte drives carrying all our films and music. With products such as Western Digital’s HDD based media players, one can connect their external Hard Disk, USB drive etc. and play films directly on the TV, no PC or DVD player required. This new model released by WD, is known as the WDTV Live; and mostly it's a rehash of their previous success, the WDTV. Let’s see what’s new in this Media player.

Design
Holding a small enough footprint to enhance portability, this piece comes in a lead colored chassis, with a very smooth and neat finish. It’s not blockish and boring, rather the corners ad front edges are curved, thus giving a sense of fluidity and smoothness to the aesthetics. The façade has a small screen with 2 tiny LED indicators for “power” and “USB connection”. One side has a single USB slot, while the other side is bare, just cut out into grilles.

Connections are lined up in a row on the back panel, which from left to right sum up as follows: AC power in, USB Slot( second one), HDMI 1.3, optical out, Ethernet port (spotlight on this please), composite AV out and component video out. Thus the main new feature in this model is the network capability. One can access files stored on home servers, networked PCs etc. Also WD has tied up with a few major names like Youtube, Flickr and Live365 for online access. Stuff like updating firmware etc becomes a breeze with this feature. Also this model is Wi-Fi capable, but a separate USB dongle is required. Normal Wi-Fi doesn’t cut it for HD video, so I will just leave that one out.

The other new feature is a new preview mode in the User interface, wherein one can watch a bit of the video in a small window positioned top rightside. This model features PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) thus one can read images off their Digital camera directly on a USB connection. Last but not least, there is a file management feature thrown in, which allows you to edit/transfer files from different locations connected. So now you can copy a file located on a server onto your external HDD, both being connected to the WDTV Live.