WD TV Media Player retails for $129.99.
(Credit: Western Digital)Western Digital has entered the media player fray with its $129.99 WD TV Media Player. The player, which reads a variety of audio, photo, and video files, is designed to be paired with a portable hard drive that's loaded with media files. Naturally, Western Digital would prefer if you purchased one of its My Passport drives, but you can connect any USB mass storage device to the WD TV Media Player.
The little black box comes with a remote and connects to your TV via HDMI or standard composite AV cables. The release says: "Users leave the WD TV HD Media Player connected to their TVs and simply plug in up to two My Passport USB drives or other USB mass storage devices loaded with HD media. Using the included remote control, they can navigate and play their content with the media player's high-definition on-screen menu. With My Passport drives now available in 500GB capacities, users can build large collections on multiple drives, all playable by WD TV."
Western Digital assumes you obtained all your media files legally, but the WD TV Media Player appears to be rather inclusive in the types of files it reads. The device also ships with ArcSoft's MediaConverter 2.5, which converts photo, video, and music files into formats optimized for use on the WD TV HD Media Player. According to Western Digital, the player supports full HD video playback--up to 1080p--via HDMI.
Here's the list of supported file formats:
Video:
MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264,
MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264), Subtitle SRT (UTF-8)
Photo:
JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Audio:
MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC,
Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Playlist PLS, M3U, WPL
We should be receiving a review sample soon and will let you know how this compares with similar products, such as Iomega's ScreenPlay TV link, which retails for just under $100. Anybody think this is a better option than Apple TV?
Video navigation screen.
(Credit: Western Digital)
(Credit:
Iomega)
Not long ago the idea of adding 500GB of storage space to a home media system was unthinkable to the average consumer, unless one was willing to pay ungodly sums of money. What a difference a couple of years make.
Iomega is releasing its "ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive" at that half-terabyte mark, a considerable leap from the 60GB capacity of its last generation. As storage technologies continue to drop in price--the new ScreenPlay is selling for around $200--it's positioned to compete with a growing number of products such as LaCie's "LaCinema Premier," which was described in CNET's 2006 review as "essentially a big hard drive with audio and video outputs and a remote control" that can work with the TV while bypassing a computer or the Internet.
The new ScreenPlay drive works much the same way but, like many other devices in this age of high definition, also includes an HD "upscaling" feature to provide higher video quality where possible. As fellow Craver David Carnoy cautioned recently, however, it behooves consumers to do their homework on this technology because it can be a dubious distinction depending on how well the TV processes video.
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