So, I just picked up the coolest little device that I’ve seen in a while. It’s the Western Digital WDTV HD Media Player.
It’s this tiny little box that you plug into your TV. Then you plug any USB hard drive or thumb drive into it. Turn it on and it lets you play any of your audio or video files.
So far, it seems to support almost any video format. I’ve seen it play my xvid files, downloaded movies, Windows media files, and they say it will also do those pesky MKV files. Someone even mentioned it will play content in an ISO of a DVD!
I have it hooked up to a 1TB drive formatted with NTFS and it seems to be playing very well. It has a folder browse mode so you can lay out the files anyway you want. Or you can just browse alphabetically, or by timestamp. I consider the last two useless if you have lots of TV shows on there. The way I name episodes would have all the shows combine together.
For outputs it has HDMI for HD content. It has an Optical output if you need it. It only supports 2 channel stereo with Dolby though. There is also standard RCA connections with stereo audio and video. I would have liked to have component outputs since my TV only has the one HDMI connection and I’m using that already for the Playstation. I think I can convert the PS3 to component though and use the HDMI for this device.
In comparison to the media capabilities of the PS3, this device seems to play all the file types. The PS3 was dependent on TVersity for data and could not play all my files correctly.
The only thing that would be better on this device is an Ethernet port so it could read content from your network. But still, loading up a drive is not too much of an issue. It’s just a nuisance to put files on daily.