WD MyBook AV-TV 1TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive
$59.99
$119.99
50% off
Reference Price
Condition: Factory Reconditioned
Capacity: 1TB
Top positive review
1 people found this helpful
The first one broke after a year of good service but had been discontinued
By Herb G on Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2015
So this is my 5th media player and the most expensive. The first one broke after a year of good service but had been discontinued, so there was no replacement available. The 2nd didn't work. The third didn't work. The 4th worked well enough but didn't give me what I specifically needed and this is important to me: As I am hard of hearing in the human speech range (too much Deep Purple at #11), no matter which center channel I use in my surround system (and I've tried some very good ones), when I'm watching movies the dialogue sounds muddy to me. However, the garbage speakers in my big screen TV actually clear up the dialogue enough, so if I route the sound through my 5.1 receiver and my TV at the same time, I can understand speech and still get surround sound plus butt-kicking bass out of my powered sub. But most media players can't do this. It's one or the other. Before buying this unit I spoke to a tech at WD and he assured me this player could play both audio playback systems at the same time. And it does so beautifully. I route an audio optical cable from the player to my 5.1 receiver (I needed a splitter because of my blu ray player but that was no big deal) and an HDMI cable for video and audio from the player to my TV and I'm extremely happy with the results. The receiver more than overwhelms all audio from the TV except dialogue, which is perfect and finding a sonic balance between them was a snap. For source material, I'm using flash drives with movies, which I patch into the handy front USB port. The remote is a delight. There is a minimum of buttons (thank goodness) and those are logically laid out. The remote has the feel of hard rubber, so it's easier to hold and operate than any other remote I own. Some reviews of this unit complain about the long wait time from pushing a button on the remote to getting something to happen but I didn't find that to be the case at all. There is way more to this unit than playing movies from flash drives and, because of my specific user needs, it's unlikely that I'll ever need it. The online user manual, for example, has 244 pages and I used maybe 3 to get a quick handle on playing movies from a flash drive, which is total simplicity. Like, I went through the setup guide and there was nothing I needed to adjust. How nice is that? Maybe if I used the WD TV Media Player for more than I do, I might find fault with it. But for my needs, it's 5 stars.
Top critical review
4 people found this helpful
Mediocre player at best
By Robert E. on Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2014
Where to start...... Pros - plays any codec format in mkv container Cons - very unresponsive user interface. Very slow navigation - no way to set it to play only the forced subtitles. It either plays the first subtitle of every video file even ones that don't have forced subs which ends up showing all the subs even if you don't need them or you have to turn off auto subs and then select the forced subs by hand.....that is if you remember that the movie has forced subs in the first place - repeatedly fails to play audio which forces you to cycle back through the audio tracks until the audio starts\ - audio sync problem unless you set the framerate to be forced to match in the main options menu - After getting the movie/tv show information from TMDB/TVDB it refuses to ignore words like 'The' or "A" or "Of" at the beginning of the title so a movie like "The Avengers" gets shown in with your movies starting with T. Also for TV shows, after getting the metadata it sorts them alphabetically instead of alphanumerically, so your series would show episode 1, then 10-19, then 2, then 2-29, etc which causes a problem when you're watching multiple episodes because it jumps around in the series - After getting the movie/tv show information it clutters up your hard drive with a folder named after the movie/tv show and also an xml and metathumb file stored within the same folder as the video instead of a subfolder (preferrably a main wdtv folder at the root of the drive). It may not seem like a big deal, but if you have a lot of movies/tv shows in one folder it gets cluttered very quickly. It's just a sloppy way of doing it - No way to manually edit/alter the info directly on the device. You have to connect your hard drive back to your PC, find the correct XML file among the dozens/hundreds in that folder and edit it that way. Even after editing the info to fix the TV show sort order issue or rename "The Avengers" to "Avengers, The" so it shows correctly in order, it won't recognize the changes after you plug the drive back in. You have to go into the main options menu and do a reset of the metadata. It's not even spelled out clearly how to do it and is a little bit of guess work to find it - Refuses to support external USB drives larger than 500 gigs that don't have their own power supply - Plays all audio through the front 2 speakers of my home theater connected via HDMI Bottom Line - The only benefit this player has over my home theater that plays media files is it supports any audio or video format inside of an MKV container. There are far too many flaws with this system to be used as a main media player if you have an alternate method. I would only suggest using it to play videos that your main player/home theater does not. You'll get a much better all around experience and better audio quality The only thing keeping me from returning these (I bought 2) is the fact that it plays VC-1 video dumped from blurays directly into mkv container instead of my home theater that only supports it in WMV or ASF containers which are near impossible to remux without reencoding. Aside from that I am not happy with these at all
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