*New* Western Digital - WD TV HD Media Player

So can this record something that is playing on my HDTV? Can I rip a blueray movie with this?????

Details seem pretty scarce on this so far, but you won't use it to rip; there's no drive. And I don't imagine it'll record anything either. It'll just play what you have otherwise ripped to a (they're hoping WD) USB HDD. Doesn't mean it might not be an interesting little box.

Anybody who gets codec info, please post.

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http://www.buy.com/prod/wd-tv-hd-med...209975073.html
Media Formats
MPEG 1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4,Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H264), JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG
MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA

Have you tried plugging that same USB HD/enclosure into your Xbox 360 to see if the 4gb+ files play OK? Might save you some money... though this new WD offering does support FLAC and a plethora of other codecs that the 360 doesn't.

No .ISO; man, when will there be a box that can handle everything you can throw at it.

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Looks like it supports the majority of formats out there (MKV support! yay!). It's weird that there isn't a product page for it on WesternDigital.com

I wish it did have a LAN connection so that we could stream media from our PC's but if it can handle a USB Hard Drive or Flash drive formatted with NTFS so that you can play files bigger than 4GB's that would be great! I'll be waiting to see some reviews on this device for sure.

I'd also be curious if it supports Transport Stream files too. Although those can easily be made in MPEG2 files using VideoRedo.

The Popcorn Hour & iStar MiniHD are similar devices but the interfaces are just way too buggy and just feel like a constant beta. When you download a new firmware/update it might fix one thing and then break something else.

If only an Xbox running XBMC could be upgraded to handle HD quality files it would be so great!

Ordered from BB.

I prefer a local drive over streaming anyway. The feature set of this box seems good - except it doesn't appear to handle DVD menus. There is a slight glimpse of the GUI on the buy.com page. Looks interesting, but I'm ready to be disappointed - as I have been with every media player.

Same here, I've been disappointed with every media player except for the Xbox running XBMC. I'll be looking forward to how it works out for you blimey!

Its on sale at BB this week for anyone interested

I'll be curious to see how the GUI and overall firmware is on this thing. Might consider picking one up, though I am more of a fan of media servers and streaming my content to a front end (ala XBMC). Having to put my content on an external USB drive from my server, then carry it into my family room, plug it in.. just seems like a hassle.

Is this method popular amongst the AVS members? I've used a main computer for a media server and used Slim Devices products for my audio (Classic, Duet, and now a Boom) and my 360 for video for several years. I've got 1.5 TB's of audio and video content so far!

Well sure, there are a lot of "if only..." in the realm of digital streaming, but my point was you'd think someone getting into it this late in the game would have all their bases covered. XBMC is how old?...and freeware to boot, but in many ways, still has all these newcomers beat.

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Bitstreaming?

Just picked one up from BB and the WD player is a delight! I can play all my archived videos that I used on my Zune, Ipod (5th Gen), and Archos 604 WIFI. It also plays pure VOB w/o any problems. Well worth the cost considering other media player that I own which have their limitations.

Glad to hear it!
Does the manual indicate whether or not USB drives formatted as NTFS are supported? Or it is limited to FAT32?

ISO ? TS ? TP ? Trickplay? Menu Nav ?
Someone give us the facts

I also just picked one of these up from Best Buy today -- for a hundred bucks, I'd call this thing a real bargain.

I tested it out by copying a 720p file in MKV format, a 720p file encoded in XVID, a 1080p file in WMV9, and a standard definition MPEG-2 file. All played successfully and without bugs -- except the WMV9 file, which changes aspect ratio when I forward or reverse scan in the video.

Picture quality is good on my 720p television, and the menus and interfaces are simple to use -- but not fancy.

The player lets you search for a specific file by name, or browse your files by type (music, pictures, video). Within a type, it is possible to have it show all the available files or just the most recent. Forward and reverse scan within a video file is possible at 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x speed. It's not particularly fancy, but it does mostly seem to work well and it is certainly functional.

For the price, I am certainly satisfied.

Does this thing work with the AVCHD from the Hauppauge HD recorder?

Great question! I second that - if it does AVCHD then I would buy this today. My entire family video collection is filmed in AVCHD. This would save me having to transcode to WMV HD to play on my 360.

But from the box it did said supporting "MPEG-4/AVC"...
I do hope it can support other file systems other than FAT32. That will solve whole bunch of problem for me.

Tom,

Have you tested it with other file systems? eg. HFS+, NTFS?
Can't wait to test it tonight!

Salado

Any pixs of the screen menus? If it displays cover art and a decent front end seems like the way to go.

I'm assuming that when you say HFS+ you mean Mac OS Extended (I believe they're interchangeable?). I bought one of these today and my HFS+ formatted Western Digital drive works well with it. I only say "well" because there's some odd message at the top of the menus that says "drive does not resolve" or something like that, but everything works just fine.

Not sure about NTFS as I'm running OS X and can't write to NTFS.

I found that 720p mkv content played flawlessly. 1080p had some issues though (blocky patched all over the screen where things had moved in a scene. I only have a 720p TV so I'm not sure if I can blame it on that, a bad HDMI cable, a high bit rate encoding or, the machine itself.

This is very much what I've been wanting for quite a while now. I prefer having a local drive as I end up having too many issues over a network. Especially when trying to stream HD content, which proved impossible with my xbox 360.

My only issue with it as of now (other than the 1080p issues) is that it seems to not recognize subtitles that are written into the mkv file. The only time I could get subs to work was when I had a separate sub file contained in a folder with the mkv file.

I'll have more time to mess around with things tomorrow. I want to test some other 1080p files. I'm unsure of compatibility with the other file types people were mentioning. If anyone wants to point me to some links with files of those types I'd be more then happy to mess around with them tomorrow.

Here is some pictures (not mine)

http://picasaweb.google.com/joshkawaii/WDTVPics#

more pics (Flickr Search)

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=wd+hd+tv

Here is a video from youtube (once again not mine)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CONfyjNPMQ0

The comments on Engadget are getting alot of hits at the moment. If you are interested in this product (I already bought mine today) you should check it out:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/01/w...yer/3#comments

It does display cover art. Or at least it did for some of the movies I had which I had apparently added art to. Not sure about music, but I don't se why it wouldn't.

As for the interface, it's not going to blow anyone out of the water, but it doesn't look bad and it certainly gets the job done. If you find the engadget story on this piece of hardware someone posted a link to pics in the comments.

The lack of a network jack is a little disappointing, but I'm glad to see a name brand bring a player like this to the J6P market!

I would love a network jack as well, but what do you expect for $99? I would be happy to fork over a little more dough for a networked version.

Once this thing gets "officially" released (this thing isn't mentioned at all on the wd website), I hope some body hacks this little box to make it more "functional". (what do you think this thing is running, linux?)

gonna start putting it through some tests tomorrow (gotta get another HDMI cable).

speedbal

So far I tested with both formats.

1. MAC OS Extended
2. MAC OS Extended with Journal (HFS+)

Also, this little beauty supports UTF-8 with multiple language support for file names. Haven't tried the SRT yet.

So far so cool.