Western Digital Live HD Media Player Review

There are tons of great little appliances taking advantage of the fantastic miniaturization and HD video capabilities of the Intel Atom platform and its competitors – specifically, NAS appliances like the Synology Diskstation and HD media centers like the Western Digital Live HD and Asus O!Play.

For those of you, like me, who have tried to build media centers using Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms in the past, you know it sounds a lot better in theory then in practice.

There are a lot of tough details to work out so that your media center is more of a transparent pleasure in your entertainment center, and less of a klutzy hassle.

1. Form Factor.

You want it to look nice next to your other components. The last thing you want is a beige box in your living room.

2. Silence.

It shouldn’t make any noise, whether its busy or not. Nothing detracts from a superb but quiet moment in a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound blockbuster then the scratching of a read head from a hard drive, or the sudden enabling of a fan.

3. Connectivity.

Ideally, its nice to have Ethernet, wireless, component, composite, and HDMI available , plus USB ports for external storage and an IR port for a remote.

4. Power.

It shouldn’t use much. A regular desktop PC can easily suck 200-250 watts. Appliances like the WD Live HD use about 10 watts!.

5. 10-ft Interface.

This is the toughest part of all, because while their are HTPC apps like Boxee which work fine while you are inside Boxee, if you want to switch to another app or if it crashes (which Boxee is want to do), you are stuck with a desktop and a remote. Plus, if you want to move between apps, like between Boxee and EyeTV, things get a little tougher.

6. Efficient design.

My Synology NAS does more things than I ever thought a NAS could do, and it does it in 128MB of RAM. That’s because the software and firmware are carefully designed known quantities. It’s extremely difficult for DIY’ers to get the same results from similar hardware.

7. Support.

I don’t mean calling a support line. I mean, one day your firmware in your media center pops up and offers to download a new version automatically and solve problems and add features very specific to its usability as a media center. Plus, being able to hang out on forums with other users with the same hardware and software as you makes debugging much easier.

8. Your Family.

OK, so you are a tech-head who actually gets excited about tweaking a home media center and doesn’t mind a bit about pulling out a keyboard to fix stuff. Guess what? Your wife hates that, and so does everyone else in your family.

All of this is incredibly expensive and difficult to get ‘just right’ and stay that way, compared to the lowly $120 of a great product like the Western Digital Live HD.

But there are some drawbacks to the WD Live too. It has no DVD/Blu-ray, TV tuner, DRM, Hulu, Netflix, or DVR capabilities, all of which you could enable with a homebrew setup.

So what CAN the WD Live do? In a nutshell, it allows you to navigate and play a wide variety of audio and video digital formats either locally on a USB drive or over the network to a shared folder or DLNA server, and it does this pretty well. I was surprised at how quickly and comprehensively it automatically found my network resources – it was better at this than my Windows 7 box.

The WD Live HD sports support for Pandora (yay), Flickr, Live365 (meh), and YouTube (which at this point my toaster supports). HD users should be aware that it seems YouTube is dropping support for HD in non-web browser appliances.

It’s a very solid, lightweight and seemingly reliable unit, that responds well to input, boots fast, and will alert you to firmware updates and install them instantly over the air with no fuss at all.

Setup should be straightforward, but for me it wasn’t as slick as I had hoped. Like a lot of HD devices, you need to hook it up to component or composite inputs to get access to the menu to change the settings to HDMI, which really takes out some of the fun and ease of setup promised by HDMI.

I have hooked about 5-6 network devices up to the switch in my entertainment center, and none of them have had problems with DHCP autoconfig. The WD Live did, but I’m not going to get down too much on them for this as to be fair, I have two networks on the switch that most people don’t have to worry about confusing the WD Live HD.

My HDMI cable was only partially inserted, which is always a fun debug. The WD Live HD is so small and light, a stiff HDMI or network cable can move it out of place very easily, which might jar other connections or adjust remote line-of-sight just enough to cause you trouble. Use the included rubber feet.

Once booted, you will find the WD Live HD easy to learn, but unnecessarily cumbersome to move through quickly.

A universal problem with video convergence appliances is that they don’t let you configure your own home menu to show only things you do 99% of the time. Imagine using a web browser without a bookmarks toolbar, Windows without a start menu or quicklaunch, or MacOS with no dock.

Instead, it uses the very predictable and ‘safe’ method of providing top-level menus for movies, music, and photos, then you drill down to the network share, USB storage, or online service you want to use, then perhaps folders within. This is made worse by the obligatory fade-in fade-out animations.

Ideally, my media center would start up and read ‘Movies on Diskstation’ ‘Music on Diskstation’ ‘Photos on Diskstation’ and ‘My Pandora Account’ – because those are the only network objects I ever intend to use. It really would be so easy to do, but no one does it.

About the best I could say about this is that there aren’t exactly a Boxee-hodgepodge of (mostly uninteresting) features in the WD Live HD, so its less annoying than Boxee’s drill-downs.

Text input with the remote is about the worst I have seen. I mean, they could have ripped off just about anyone’s technique and it would work better – especially for entering IP addresses – the numbers appear linearly – just using a phone dial layout would be more efficient. Luckily, it gets the job done and it mostly needed only for manual setup and account logins for services like YouTube (which, thankfully, it remembers).

The interface is obviously designed to scale down well and while it is rendered very nicely, does not take advantage of HD resolution to make navigation easier. Having a left-hand menu of bookmarks and recently accessed media with a drilldown or preview window on the right would make it twice as usable instantly.

I am a big fan of having a ‘now playing’ window that PIPs to the corner while you use menus, which Comcast and most other cable provider HD DVRs do. It amazes me that my TiVo HD does not – it just plops the guide down over whatever your watching, or completely leaves the video entirely to navigate menus. This would also be a nice interface feature for the WD HD Live. This is a minor gripe for this type of device however, where there is less need to do ‘other stuff’ while watching.

While we’re on the topic of TiVo HD – one of my favorite inventions of all time, I need to take a moment to punch them in the gut, because they are totally asleep at the switch.

Rather than use popular network sharing features like DLNA, TiVo has always gone with its horrifically slow and unreliable TiVo Desktop software. Although I have never had too much trouble downloading video off my TiVo with it, its rare I ever want to. The real problem is in the opposite direction – watching video files off the Windows box with TiVo. TiVo will ‘see’ my Windows box about 99% of the time, but I have probably only been able to get it to see any *media* shared by TiVo Desktop about 1% of the time.

Even if it did work, I have no interest in keeping my 250-watt Windows box up and running 24/7 – that’s why I have a NAS. TiVo Desktop does not support NAS devices.

The support for TiVo Desktop has historically been terrible as well.

The whole point of me bringing this up is that if TiVo would simply get off its butt and support DLNAB, there would really be no reason for me to need the WD Live HD box or change inputs on my TV to switch between TiVo and my digital media. To take it one step further, to have at least *the option* of a TiVo with a built-in DVD or Blu-Ray player would also reduce my need for additional devices and inputs.

When TiVo allowed third parties to make its hardware, Pioneer had an exceptional TiVo model with a built-in DVD *burner*/player, with 480P component out. It was my favorite TiVojust because I could switch between DVDs and DVR instantly with one box, one input, and one remote. How does TiVokeep stepping ‘back’?

To its credit, the inclusion of Amazon On Demand to TiVois an exceptional feature, especially since at this point in time HD Cablecards do not support On-Demand cable services.

I can hear the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 users clamoring ‘but we can do ALL of that!’ and its true – but at the same time, they aren’t HD DVRs either. The XBox 360 only has a DVD player, and the Playstation 3 sucks about as much power as a small refrigerator just to play back an MP3.

If you already own either one of these boxes, you really aren’t going to get much value out of a Western Digital Live HD, except for massive power savings and perhaps file format support (MKV?). I am not sure about Pandora/YouTube on < a type="amzn">XBox/< a type="amzn">PS3, but I know both also have downloadable movies and at least one if not both has Netflix support, neither of which are supported by the Western Digital Live HD.

When browsing DLNA on the Western Digital Live HD, I noticed that all of my DLNA media – photos, images, and video, would appear under each category, but it won’t play, for example, music files if you are drilled down into the video category of the menu. I don’t know if this was my NAS DLNA server not being specific about the content of each category to the media center, or the media center not caring, but it’s annoying and magnifies the fact that you have to ‘drill down’ to access different media types, even if they are on the same server.

Western Digital, being a hard drive maker, really wants you to use this device with an external hard drive. In fact, the setup documentation seems to infer its *required* for setup, ‘but you can turn it off later’. This is completely untrue, you can setup and use the box entirely over your network with no hard drive attached from the get-go.

As far as picture quality goes, no complaints here, playing back big DiVx movies on the Western Digital Live HD was quick and looked nice, fast forwarding working better than average.

Conclusion

The Western Digital Live HD is an exceptionally affordable, tidy, professionally made, and extremely efficient and adorable little device for what it does – but what it does is somewhat limited and while I hear its interface is more professional than its competitors, its not going to win any usability awards for its navigation.

If you have an XBox 360 or PS3, or anything connected to your TV with decent DLNA and file format support, you probably do not need or want a Western Digital Live HD.

But in a world of 55-inch 1500-watt 1080p Plasmas, always-on HD DVRs and 400-watt gaming systems, the little $120, 10-watt (!!) Western Digital Live HD will fill many peoples needs in an adorably affordable and efficient package.

Western Digital Live HD

File Formats Supported

Video – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9

Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG

Audio – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL

Subtitle – SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI

Note:

- MPEG2 MP@HL up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30 or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- MPEG4.2 ASP@L5 up to 1280x720p30 resolution and no support for global motion compensation.
- WMV9/VC-1 MP@HL up to 1280x720p60 or 1920x1080p24 resolution. VC-1 AP@L3 up to 1920x1080i30, 1920x1080p24 or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- H.264 BP@L3 up to 720x480p30 or 720x576p25 resolution.
- H.264 MP@L4.1 and HP@4.1 up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30, or 1280x720p60 resolution.
- An audio receiver is required for multi-channel surround sound digital output.
- Compressed RGB JPEG formats only and progressive JPEG up to 2048×2048.
- Single layer TIFF files only.
- Uncompressed BMP only.

For details, please refer to the user manual.

File Formats Not Supported
Does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes® Store, Cinema Now, Movielink®, Amazon Unbox™, and Vongo®

Connectivity
Interface Ethernet, HDMI, Composite A/V, Component video, USB 2.0