Western Digital WD TV Live Hub Media Center
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"WD TV Live Hub Media Center (WDBABZ0010BBK) - Bring your digital life to your big screen. Whether it's your own videos, music, and photos or Internet entertainment, you can play 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."
Review Nice Video Player But
Mediocre Music Jukebox,
This review is from: Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB
Media Center (Electronics)
There really aren't that many products like the WD Live Hub out right
now. Sure, there are media streaming devices available from dozens of
manufacturers, but your choices are few if you want one with internal
storage. With its 1 TB hard drive, the WD Live Hub has plenty of space
for a ton of media. The other advantage it has over its competitors is
support for a ton of file formats -- including .mkv, as well as more
standard formats such as .avi, .mp3 etc. Setup is relatively simple: plug the device into the wall and your television and it will boot up automatically. You can add media from your computer over the network or via USB device (USB being significantly faster). The only annoyance with USB is that you can't pick and choose what to copy -- everything on the drive just gets copied over. It'll even copy over non-media files, which is good for backup purposes, but irritating when you're initially setting up the device. Copying files over the network (through my Airport Extreme N Router; computer connected via WiFi, WD Live connected via Ethernet to the router) is too slow to be useful; speeds of 1.2 MB/S just won't cut it when you have to transfer hundreds of gigs. Through USB, my speeds topped out at around 12 MB/S. The network drive functionality is certainly cool, and useful for transferring new files as you acquire them, but if you have a large media library then USB drive is really the only way to go. Although seeing the drive and copying files to it via my Windows 7 computer was a snap, I had more difficulty connecting to my network shared files via the Hub itself; I don't have a password for my computer, but the Hub didn't recognize this, and asked for a username/login. Leaving them blank didn't work. The manual may have a work around for this, but I didn't see it -- I'm sure there's a way to fix it, but it's annoying that the device can't recognize that I have no password and just login automatically.
I'm not a huge fan of the user interface; it's not difficult to navigate via the included remote, but a bunch of options are designated to different buttons, instead of having a single options menu. I kept forgetting which color button corresponded to which set of options -- does the green button bring up the storage selection screen or change the file layout on screen? I'm sure this would become second nature after a bit, but I think it's unnecessary to begin with. I wish they had just teamed up with Microsoft or XBMC so I didn't have to learn a proprietary, new (and clunkier) interface.
Videos look nice played back in HD via HDMI -- pretty much the same as when I play them through my Xbox 360 or computer. It makes for a very nice video storage unit, and if you don't have an Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or laptop computer with HDMI out, I would recommend this product. I had difficulty streaming .mkvs, but .avis streamed fine. According to the Western Digital forums, there are ways to stream your .mkvs to the device; if you have them stored on it, however, they will work fine. It will not play copyrighted video, such as from iTunes or Amazon Unbox, but this is to be expected. Navigation via the remote is relatively simple, and gives you the option, depending on file, to go to a specific point in the video. If you pause the video to play another media file, the device will save your position, so long as you don't power it down.
Music playing is another story. I was interested in using this as a centralized music jukebox, where all the computers on my network could copy their music files to create a nice music collection. While this part is easy enough and works well, the playback experience leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, the navigation features for the music leave much to be desired. The main problem is the lack of an ability to truly create playlists on the fly using the device. The Hub will read playlist files that you have created from media programs, but its sole playlist creating mechanism is the "add to queue" feature. It's not terribly intuitive, and to do this requires a bunch of button presses. If you're already playing a track, then add a new one to the queue, then it would follow that the newly added file would play after the first is finished playing...but this is not the case. Instead, after the first track's completion, playback will either stop (if there are no other files in the original music track's folder) or play the next song in the original file's folder/playlist. To see your queue and play files from it, you must navigate to a different menu. If this sounds confusing, that's because it is -- it simply does not work well at all, and it's a terrible device for spontaneous music listening.
I did not test the photo functionality, although if that is your sole reason for purchasing this device you can probably find something that is cheaper and more tailored to your needs.
As with most streaming devices, the Hub offers a lot of services such as Netflix, Pandora, Blockbuster On Demand (which allows you to rent movies a la carte -- this is NOT the same thing as Netflix, but more like what Amazon On Demand offers), Flickr and Facebook. I didn't use any of them, so I can't comment on these aspects.
The support for a wide range of file formats, 1 TB internal storage and wide range of services available on WD Live Hub make it a worth a look if you're trying to stream/play HD video on your television. The poor playlist creation features, lack of eSata port, inability to attach directly to a computer via USB, no printed manual, and no built in WiFi, however, bring this product down a star. I personally think that the Xbox 360 is a better media solution; the only problem being that you must purchase a USB hard drive to make up for the lack of internal storage(making it about $50 more than this device) and that it doesn't have support for .mkvs....................
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