WD TV Live Media Player with Wi-Fi

Given the sub-$100 price the WD TV Live is a merely adequate choice for streaming media to your TV on a tight budget. This is a "low frills" device that can play a wide variety of media. The "bells and whistles" are mostly fluff with very little substance. If you need to stream video from your PC, NAS or USB HDD and you don't own an Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii then this is a very cheap alternative, but one that is very unlikely to "wow" you in any way. What it delivers in media-handling versatility is mitigated by its awkward and ugly GUI and lack of useful customization. It is merely "ok" and given alternatives, I don't see it as a "must have" device for anyone. Setup: Setting up the device was straightforward and fairly simple. I'm tech savvy and I had no problems installing it and getting it to recognize my network. I'm not sure how well the average consumer would do if they confronted a problem. The device came with virtually no documentation other than a simple fold out pamphlet that shows, in pictures only, how it plugs in (assuming everything goes well). It provides no methods for rectifying potential pitfalls, no explanations of menus, no list of device features or functions. The multi-language warranty sheet was ten times longer. Granted the WD website provides plenty of information - but only if you can find it. There are numerous FAQs and forums for WD TV Live, but given that Western Digital has now named four of their devices VERY similarly (two identically, even though they possess very different features!) it can be somewhat daunting to try to find useful or helpful information that is specifically relevant to this model. We're disappointed in WD for not including more information explaining the functions and features of this unit. Our Experience: The device itself is very small, which means it will fit nearly anywhere in your entertainment center. It is very lightweight and feels rather cheap, but it looks nice with an understated styling. Even though it is very lightweight it stays puts with power, video and Ethernet cables attached, thanks to the grippy rubber feet on the bottom. The LED light on the front is noticeable, but not distracting, even in a fully dark room, while watching video. We're using a standard definition CRT television. SD video display is subpar at best and often cringe-inducing. Menus flicker and display oddly, apparently due to conflicting scan rates, poor font choices or just poor design. Viewing photos on an SD TV was not enjoyable due to the odd handling of scan lines, which leaves many photos flickering in places, colors oddly distorted, or exhibiting a high amount of banding and moire patterns. I'm sure on HDTV it looks stunning, but on SD it's a nightmare to look at. Conversely, the Xbox 360 does a beautiful job of displaying media on standard definition and minimizes flickering and moire patterns. It is fairly clear that Western Digital only included composite SD output as a "last resort" and put little to no thought into making it an enjoyable experience for those of us who lack HD televisions. The only forethought was the option to have adjustable over- and underscan in the settings so that the menus would display properly on a range od SD TVs, but it's important to note that this applies ONLY to the menus and not to media playback (which will still experience considerable overscan in most cases, even with 4:3 media). We also encountered numerous issues using our own photos as "wallpaper" for the main menu. It seemed the device could not properly resize them to fit the screen, even though it seemed to have no problem doing so in the photo viewer or slideshow screensaver. It would either display a portion of the full photo, a extremely narrow horizontal strip of the center of the photo, or a highly distorted and "squashed" version. Menu functions are slow to respond to remote input which makes quickly navigating a long list frustrating and time consuming. If you quickly multi-tap the navigation buttons on the remote and then stop you will see your highlighted choice continuing to move in an attempt to "catch up" with your actions which occasionally has you unintentionally going further than you wanted. The Dashboard menus displayed on the bottom of the main screen are navigable with the left and right buttons and each pops up with a small icon animation. These are also slow and occasionally give the impression that the device is chugging and can't keep up with you. This all adds up to a frustrating experience that feels slow and cumbersome. This is unacceptable from a dedicated set-top box. Additionally, the layout of the dashboard is not customizable meaning you will forever have to navigate around choices you may never use. The overall look and style of the menus isn't bad, but certainly not great, and requires more effort than is probably necessary in order to get from point A to point B. Not a deal breaker, but certainly not the most elegant solution to navigating via a remote control. You can program "short cuts" on the number pad, such a 1 for video, 2 for photos, and 3 for music. This is helpful, but not to someone who hasn't been trained to know what those shortcuts are. A customizable 3x2 grid on the main menu would have been much more helpful. To sum up, the dashboard is slow, ugly and cumbersome to use. The onscreen keyboard function is also frustrating at best. Because of the input lag it can become difficult to use the arrow buttons on the remote to quickly enter text. You can use a "texting" style of input as well, whereby you use the number pad to enter text much in the same way as you would on the dial pad of a cell phone. We had issues with both of these methods, as halfway through entering a user name or password, the unit would simply jump to a random menu or settings panel. My guess is that occasionally the unit interprets one of the "number pad" shortcut entries as a user request to jump to another menu on the device. If this is the case it is strange that the device doesn't put such a feature "on hold" when doing text-entry. In any case it led to frustration as we sometimes had to repeatedly try to enter a user name or password as many as six times, hoping that the device wouldn't flip out and jump to another menu. If you are someone who uses long passwords with random characters (which many do for security reasons) you may find that entering them on the WD TV Live via remote to be a daunting experience. This is also extremely annoying when setting up custom network settings. Thankfully the keyboard is in a QWERTY layout, but with the row of numbers at the bottom, but no "shift" key, only an "all caps" choice meaning extra navigation to select CAPS, then the letter to captilize, then going back to deselect CAPS mode and then continuing to type. I thought the Xbox 360 onscreen keyboard was frustrating, but it is elegant in comparison to this. Media Playback and Navigation: I have my movies, videos, photos and music on my PC, connected to the WD TV Live via Ethernet. Using Microsoft file sharing I easily made my media collection (and internet) available to the WD TV Live. It had no trouble seeing my media and in most cases it correctly found and added metadata and thumbnails. Navigating the media collection is not very impressive. The interface, in my opinion, is rather spartan and lacks style, and though you have choices of display method, none of them looks particularly friendly or attractive. All are slow. The quality of playback is fine. It displays all media equally as well as my PC with no hiccups, buffering or lag in the display. It seems to have no problem with playback of DVD ISO files and handles the DVD menus perfectly, which is actually a very nice feature for those wanting to digitize their movie collection and eschew physical media completely. Playback of video performs adequately, though does typically require 3 to 5 seconds of waiting before the video starts. Pausing and resuming is instantaneous, even after considerably long pauses. Rewinding or fast forwarding had strange results. For example, if at 05:00 in the video I would rewind 30 seconds to 1 minute when I hit "Play" it would not stop rewinding, or would simply return to playing at 05:00 or within a second or two of that time. I would sometimes have to rewind up to 10:00 or more in order to get it to actually go back. Fast forwarding suffered the same glitchiness and inconsistency. With DVD ISO files this was not a problem, but rewinding and fast forwarding was choppy and made finding the correct portion mostly guesswork and sometimes wondering if it registered your button pushing. When paused you can't frame advance, rewind or fast forward at all, regardless of the video media type. Skipping a chapter (or jumping forward) isn't instantaneous and sometimes takes a second or two, again leaving you wondering if the device registered your input. Music playback works, but is nothing spectacular and the interface is less than stellar. I don't realy see this as being a make-or-break factor for anyone in the consideration of this device. The remote itself is low quality. The buttons are high, require an unusually firm press and have a deep "click" feel to them. The playback buttons are positioned at the top of the remote making them slightly awkward to reach. The lack of volume buttons seems like an oversight in my opinion although the remote does sport a mute button. Online Features: We didn't buy this for the online features, so we considered them to be a bonus. Of all the online connectivity it boasts we were most excited at the notion of surfing Youtube while sitting on the couch. Unfortunately, Youtube navigation is hindered by the sub-par remote control experience and worse, Youtube blocks most of their best content from being viewed on TV connected devices which means all VEVO content can never be viewed along with many other videos. Likewise, even if you use your own Youtube account, all you can view are your favorites or your own videos, as subscriptions do not show up and can't be accessed. This all adds up to a fairly useless Youtube experience for us. There is probably lots of other great Youtube content but finding it via the WD TV Live's oddly integrated search feature requires exiting out of each video to the "main" Youtube menu, then navigating to a completely separate search menu and then using the frustrating on-screen keyboard (hoping that it doesn't mysteriously transport you to another random menu on the device). The search feature shows "recent" searches, but isn't "smart" in the Google sense and doesn't provide any suggestions while typing, or display relevant search topics related to what you've entered. Despite the WD TV Live being unable to display VEVO or other "premium" content those videos will still show up in searches or while browsing leading to a frustrating guessing game of what will or won't play. We just stopped using the Youtube channel completely. We also tried Fringo which promised tons of TV content but ended up being nothing but previews and clips, with no full episodes to be found. The Hulu support is restricted to HuluPlus, so unless you are a subscriber, you get no Hulu at all. We don't have Netflix so we can't say whether this is a good alternative to a Roku, and we have not tried the Blockbuster rental/purchase options. The rest of the "free" internet video options seem to offer little in the way of any full episodic content. Even the PBS channel is devoid of content with only a mere handful of short clips, which is odd for a station that shares tons and tons of their full episodes on PBS.org for free. If you are using an HDTV you may find the Picasa and Flickr options enjoyable, but on SD they look terrible, and once again, navigation is atrocious using the WD menus. We can't see how this would be an enjoyable method for using Facebook. There is integrated functionality in media options menus to let people know what media you are watching, which seems odd, but at least you are given the option. The device auto-updated its own firmware which gave an extensive list of fixes and additional features, none of which are documented or explained, either on the device or on WD's website. For example, the latest firmware touts a new "Screen Capture" feature, but there is no information about it on Western Digital's site, nor in the forums, and no such feature seems to be present in any menu or options screen. Additionally, there is little information on how to add media to your favorites (the little heart icon) or how to rate it with the little "stars" icons shown next to all your media. These features show up, but there seems to be no button on the remote or options in the options to activate or utilize them. With no documentation included it is an exercise left to the consumer to discover their applicability or usage. Additional notes: We have programmed our Logitech Harmony 300i remote to use with the WD TV Live. At first, the Harmony wouldn't adequately replicate all the remote functions, and then I realized why. If you tell the Harmony (in the Logitech setup) "Western Digital, TV Live" it only provides the command set for the previous generation which did not have a number pad or additional menu options. This generation of TV Live shares the same remote and GUI that the TV Live Hub uses. If you program your Harmony to use the TV Live Hub remote you will have all of your functions available, although you will still need to assign them yourself, for the most part. Unfortunately, using the Harmony remote didn't solve the input lag issue. This is clearly a lack of "oomph" in the WD TV Live itself, with little care given to making the menus speedy, intuitive or easy to navigate. Using the Harmony also didn't solve the random menu-jumping caused when entering text, whether by onscreen keyboard (using arrow keys) or by numpad text entry method. The Harmony remote feels nicer, however, and allows volume control and a more comfortable ergonomic custom button layout. I'm sure almost any universal remote would be an improvement over the WD TV Live's included remote. If you will be using a wireless network to share media from your PC, keep in mind that you will likely need Wireless N for best results if you are streaming high bitrate files or HD video. Additionally, because of the way Shares work and the way the TV Live works, anyone with access to the network will be able to see, modify, or delete your media. The WD TV Live requires 100% unfettered read/write access to your Network Share media so that it can add/update metadata and other information. This means if your network is not entirely secure that you are leaving your media open to anyone and everyone. Using NAS drives or a USB HDD will alleviate this issue, but at considerable additional time and cost if you need to switch to it. If that is the case, consider the combined costs and perhaps seek an alternative digital media system. Summary: We would prefer to give this device 2 1/2 stars. We don't hate it, but it's not exactly fun to use either. For the price we are glad to be able to watch our movies streaming from the PC. As soon as we can afford something better, however, this box will be gone and won't be missed. The use of it is not pleasant or transparently intuitive, or helpful. It is a merely adequate, occasionally annoying, low-budget option for getting digital media to your living-room. It doesn't do anything exceptionally well and sometimes promises much more than it can satisfyingly deliver. For what we paid we will keep it, but we are definitely not thrilled with it. We didn't expect miracles from it but it provides a far less enjoyable experience than we were expecting given previous reviews we've read. Knowing what we do now, we would not have purchased this device and definitely would not recommend it to others unless it was the only option for their budget. What makes this more shocking, to us, is that this device seems to share the same design elements as the TV Live Hub ($199) which makes us very glad that we didn't spend extra for the integrated HDD. To spend that much and have this frustrating user experience would have been very disappointing. We can only hope that this ugly, clumsy and error-prone GUI will be streamlined with firmware updates. tl;dr Steer clear of the WD TV Live unless you only have $90 and NO other options. Little customization and a frustrating GUI.