[Defcon]

I'm looking to buy a media streamer for my parents, so the requirements are quite simple -


- does not need to have advanced features such as network/wifi/bluray/iso

- does need to playback most content including h264, realmedia, wmv, which I guess they all do?

- does not need internal hard disk, but would be nice

- online content such as youtube/hulu etc is nice but not a must (they don't have broadband)

- Must have a nice UI, easy to use - by nice UI I mean at least more than filenames

- Price must be

 

[Dion250]

WDTV1 (gen2 this is important) or WDTV Live is the best option for this.. It probably has the best Interface of all the players. (default ones)

 

[Derelict_Drvr]

From Western Digital, only the Mini supports RMVB, and it doesn't have HDMI. Also it will only play WMV9 video. The WDTV Live and the WDTV HD Gen 2 do not support RMVB, but do have HDMI. And again, only WMV9.


The GUI on all of these is easy enough to understand that, with just a little bit of teaching, my 5 year old grand daughter can use it. I have all of my grand kids videos on a WD My Passport 160GB hard drive and they use it all the time.

 

[Defcon]

I purchased the WDTV Live at Bestbuy tonight. It was easy to setup and I watched a few movies, but I also had problems -


- multichannel aac audio did not work

- flv did not work

- I was not able to get it working with windows 7 over the network


Only the 1st one is a serious issue as I have a bunch of movies with aac. Googling around I see this is a known issue. I would also have liked it to stream from the DLNA server in Windows but it did not see any files.


Other than that I thought the UI is very pleasing and simple to navigate. it even picked up folder jpg's for some movies and I can now add more. The remote is really tiny (a bit too much) but I have no complaints.