Media Player
Western Digital is best known for making
hard drives, but since 2008 has also been making its own ‘WD TV’ line of media
players.
The latest generation WD TV Live is widely
available under $200 in NZ yet still ticks a lot of boxes for such a slim price
tag.
The tiny unit is about the size of a large
wallet and packs Ethernet and built-in Wi-Fi for network connectivity. HDMI and
S/PDIF optical ports are included for digital video/audio, phono RCA jacks (via
dongle) provide analog video and audio, and you get a USB port at front and
rear to attach hard drives. You can also connect a keyboard to one of the USB
ports if you’d prefer to make entering search keywords that much easier.
After connecting the WD TV Live to my
television and powering it up I was greeted with an elegant and intuitive
graphical user interface. That was followed by a prompt to download a software
update, which was an automated process after accepting the pop up.
A quick Google search revealed that Western
Digital releases fairly regular updates to its WD TV products, adding new
features or fixing old bugs, which is a very good thing.
The remote control is what I would describe
as medium size, with an ergonomic design and comfortable rubberized grip. There
are buttons for full play back control and menu operation plus an alphanumeric
keypad which provide excellent control options without feeling cluttered.
File support appears excellent with most of
the variants of AVI, MPG and MKV being listed on the box as supported, and I
couldn’t find a video file in my library that it wouldn’t play. Even a 1080p
video encoded with x 264 (a popular open-source encoding method taking over
from Xvid) was fine.
With a full USB drive connected to the WD
TV Live, I was able to stream media easily to other DLNA certified devices on
my home network, such as an Android tablet and smartphone. It also
automatically found the shared media library on my Windows 7 PC. That’s not a
remarkable feature in itself, but it’s nice that I didn’t have to wrangle with
settings or configuration pages to get there.
Aside from simple hard drive and network
playback, the WD TV Live also has many internet streaming features via apps
found on its Services page.
Sadly New Zealand can’t access globally
popular services such as Netflix, which charges a monthly subscription for
access to many of the latest movies and TV shows. The WD TV Live doesn’t
support the local equivalent Quickflix, either, so this unit is limited to more
mundane web apps like Facebook, You Tube and Shoutcast.
Also worth mentioning is the WD TV Remote
app for Android and iOS devices. Despite some scathing reviews, it functioned
well for me. The simple fact that Western Digital went to the effort to release
a free app deserves brownie points.
All in all, the WD TV Live does everything
a basic media player should do, without any whizz bang gimmickry to complicate
things,
At a glance
·
Streaming media player with built-in Wi-Fi
·
No onboard storage
·
Good codec support
·
Regular software updates
Western digital WD TV live
Price: $189
Contact: www.wdc.com
An excellent media player that sticks to
the basics but does them well
Value: 9/10
Apple TV
Media player
There are two reasons why you would want to
buy an Apple TV media player.
The first reason would be because you’re
already invested in Apple’s ecosystem and its large movie selection, and other
brands of media player don’t support your burgeoning library of iTunes movies
and music, with their proprietary file types and digital content protection
methods.
The second reason would be to buy it and
‘jailbreak’ it to install something that plays nice with all your digital
media, like XBMC.
Sadly, according to a few pages of Google
results, you can’t jailbreak this new version yet. If this is what you want to
do, go and buy the second-generation model instead. It’s almost identical in
every way, except that it’s limited to 720p video output.
If you are a true Apple junkie, on the
other hand, then by all means get this new model. When we first reviewed it in
March this year, we liked the fact that it has one of the best catalogues of
movies to rent on demand (they still charge up to $8 a pop though), and it has
great performance when streaming HD files over a home Wi-Fi network.
The unit is also nice and small with an
extremely minimalist remote (two buttons plus a directional pad) and it is
pretty darn cheap- although in my opinion they may as well give it away for
free, considering you won’t get much use out of it if you don’t pay for movies
and music through Apple’s iTunes and/or ‘Match’ services.
At a glance
·
Full HD 1080p media streaming
·
Excellent user interface
·
Can’t be jail broken like previous model
·
Only plays content from Apple iTunes and Match
Apple TV
Price: $159
Contact: www.apple.com
A media player with classic Cupertino
design, usability, and incompatibility with anything that isn’t Apple-related
Value: 6/10
D-Link Boxee Box
Media player
Late last year we took a look at the Boxee
Box from D-Link and found it was a capable media player, with some interesting
channels and apps. It just needed a bit more popular movie and TV content to
make it a worthwhile product.
I would love to be able to report that the
situation has improved but sadly that is not the case. TVNZ On Demand is still
the only natively supported TV streaming app, and if your internet connection
can support a 1,500Kbit stream then it’s actually quite a cool feature. The
rest of the content available is mostly what you would expect the least popular
half of 400 American cable TV channels to provide.
I say ‘mostly’ because scattered here and
there amongst the seemingly hundreds of apps are some gems that at least a few
people would appreciate, such as no less than three Starcraft channels, an
Escapist channel (for fans of the hilarious Zero Punctuation game reviews), and
yes I’m serious a Happy Tree Friends channel.
The rest of the Boxee’s media player
capabilities are good. It has great file support, and local media streaming
works flawlessly. The full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote is cool,
and the Boxee has built in Wi-Fi and a web browser which is surprisingly
usable.
The available internet content still sucks
though. It doesn’t even have Quickflix (not that this would improve things by
much). And it is too expensive there are good streaming media players like the
WD TV Live which will do much the same job at almost half the price.
Given that D-Link has had almost a whole
year to improve Boxee content in NZ and it hasn’t, I’m actually going to
downgrade its original 3.5 star rating to 3. Poor form.
At a glance
·
TVNZ On Demand access
·
Good media player capabilities
·
Interesting apps
·
Overpriced
D-Link Boxee Box (DSM-380)
Price: $350
Contact: www.dlink.com
A well designed and usable product, but
overpriced considering it doesn’t provide access to a lot of popular internet
content like the overseas version does.
Value: 6/10
