Although designed for the My Passport Portable Hard Drive, the WD TV HD Media Player works with many other USB storage devices, allowing you full full HD video playback and navigation up to 1080p. Simple to use, WD TV just plugs into your drive and it's ready to play your HD content on your TV or home entertainment system. There’s no need to figure out complicated networking devices or reconnect AV and power cables. WD TV provides the spectacular picture quality of HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio. You can use the included remote control to navigate through your entertainment choices with the player's crisp, animated HD menus. In the end, this media player is the most convenient way to play HD movies or user-generated videos, listen to high-quality digital music collections and watch high-resolution slideshows of your family photos on your TV.
Please Note: Actual formatted capacity may vary.
Average Customer Rating:
4.1 out of 5
Rating Snapshot
(7 reviews)
5 stars
1
4 stars
6
3 stars
0
2 stars
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1 star
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7 of 7 (100%) customers would recommend this product to a friend.
Ordering Information
Price:
$ 99.95
Status: Ships Today
Quantity:
Customer Reviews for WD TV HD Media Player
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player
Overall Rating:
55
Performance:
55
Ease of Use:
55
Just What I Needed!
Date: October 14, 2009
Written By:
Bobcat1From: Indiana
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Expert
Pros: design, Display Quality, easy to use, Portability/Size/Weight, value for money Cons: remote is a little slow to respond
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player I really love this product! Picked it up for about $100 including free shipping. I bought this player to fill two needs: 1) To use in our minivan in place of the built-in system. and 2) To play videos at home without having to mess with dvd recordables.
Our minivan - 2003 Town and Country has nice built-in DVD player. Unfortunately minivan unit does not like most recorded DVDs. Note minivan does play DVD-R on some ocassions. Fortunately, the minivan unit has an auxilliary a/v input available. We use that unit to play nintendo on long trips. THE COOL PART - I plug the WD HD Player into the a/v inputs. Now we can play tons of movies thru the media player. Don't have to bring DVDs - which get scratched up. I just put the movies onto a flash drive and we're good to go! I've got a 16gb drive - you can put a lot of video files on that. Since the media player will play fomats like .AVI and .MP4 (and lots more), you can put a ton of movies on one flash drive. Also the unit is really small - so not a nuisance in the car (or at home).
Also once we get to our destination, we can take the WD media player into the hotel or house or wherever and play videos there also.
The other related purpose I had for the drive is to play videos at home without having to burn movies onto dvd recordables. This thing is saving time and space and money. It saves time - because I don't have to mess with making DVDs. Saves space - because don't have to use computer resources converting to DVDs. Also saves space because it is physically so small.
It's not perfect - but it's really good and worth the money. One thing that could improve is the remote control. It's really small. That could be good or bad - I have to be really careful to not lose it. I keep it away from the kids. The remote also has a bit of a latency issue. What I mean is when you press a button it takes a moment for the box to react. This is a consistent behavior. You can get used to it and adjust but will feel funny at first.
Also another positive the Western Digital website has great support info for the unit. You can download the manual right now if you like. Also they have flash updates available - but I did not seem to need any.
Oh I forgot to mention the High Def looks absolutely fabulous. My TV is only 720P but I love the video output on this thing. Note the unit will output at full 1080 - but my TV is not that good.
Bottom Line: Just What I Needed (play your own Cars music now)
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Review 2 for WD TV HD Media Player
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
35
Ease of Use:
55
A great tool, falls a bit short.
Date: September 7, 2009
Written By:
Serend77From: Elbert, CO
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Pros: Display Quality, easy to use, Portability/Size/Weight, sound quality
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player I like that I can play audio and video files off my SD card/thumb drive and external hard drives. What I don't like is that it can't play a series of video files like a slide show and it can't play DVD movie files off the SD card or hard drive. An S-video output would also be nice to have.
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Review 3 for WD TV HD Media Player
Top 500 Contributor
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
35
WD-TV by a Mac user
Date: May 26, 2009
Written By:
AnonymousFrom: Mountain View, CA
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Pros: Display Quality, Portability/Size/Weight, value for money Cons: Manual/Instructions, effort to rip videos
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player I bought the WD-TV with 2 MyBook 1TB drives so that I could rip my kids DVDs and stop losing them to scratches and misplacement (has anyone else found that 6 year olds think they are some kind of toy for their games?).
Let me first explain why I got 2 MyBooks. I have these set up to just be identical copies of each other. One is my "Master" that I keep permanently attached to my Mac. The other is my Active drive that I disconnect from the Mac and take over to the WD-TV and play movies from.
At first I thought I would configure the 2 dirves as a RAID mirror and would just take one in and out and let Apple's RAID software rebuild it each time with the new content I had added, but that didn't seem to work - very slow and wasn't automatic as I hoped. So, I am using ChronoSync to do a one-way backup/mirror from the Master to the Active drive.
The next challenge is to get content into the right format for the WD-TV. The WD-TV comes with software for doing this on a PC, but not on a Mac. Fortunately there are a couple options for this on the Mac. I have been using Handbrake with VLC to do the job. Their forums have some good hints for how to do it, but be warned that it takes a bit of reading to figure it all out. I am rather new to video and I find it amazing that there are some many choices for video format and no clear winner. I have been encoding my video's using H.264 into a MKV file format because this seems to allow fast-forward and chapter selection. But even with that, there are still quite a few other options.
As far as using the device... I have the WD-TV connected to a standard definition CRT TV using the composite input, so when I say the picture is great, I am not judging it by its 1080p quality. The menus are easy enough to follow, but a bit clumsy. I put my videos into a "videos" folder and sort them further into subfolders. But then when you go to navigate the folders, the Video folder adds one extra step to the process, so I may ditch that. I like that they let you view thumbnails of your videos. Be sure to get the FW update to 1.02.07 as this allows the thumbnails to be separate JPG files so you don't need special software to embed them into the video file. You do still need to find/make thumbnails. I have been grabbing many from online DVD sellers - like Amazon. WD doesn't tell you the optimum dimensions, but I experimentally found that they should be about 1.5 times taller than wide or they will be squeezed down to fit the box they show. I made some as 720 tall x 480 wide.
I haven't tried photos or music yet because that isn't my application.
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Review 4 for WD TV HD Media Player
Top 250 Contributor
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
45
Good quality/value for the price
Date: March 27, 2009
Written By:
fairplayFrom: Boulder, Co
Owned this Product for:
3-12 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Pros: Display Quality, easy to use, Portability/Size/Weight, value for money Cons: remote can be sluggish
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player 3 months + use of the Media Player and updated the firmware. Cons: Remote a little sluggish and unit seems to run when not in use, heating up slightly. Pros: Have viewed all types of vid files (Standard & High Def) on 2 different 42" Plasmas w/ complete satisfaction. Works fantastic w/W D portable hard drives, using 2 currently. After adjusting to quirks in design, realize it performs what you ask it to. Good value for the money.
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Review 5 for WD TV HD Media Player
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
55
Don't waste your time burning DVDs
Date: March 20, 2009
Written By:
MoviesMusicFrom: Gaithersburg, MD
Owned this Product for:
0-3 Months
Level of Expertise:
Good
Pros: design, Display Quality, easy to use, Portability/Size/Weight, sound quality, value for money
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player This players works great, picture is much better than I expected. My Harmony 620 remote control supports it. Only issue found so far is audio in .mkv files. It displays a message: "Audio channel 1 unsupported". I downloaded new firmware from WD website, but it did not solve the problem. However after transcoding files to mp4 everything works well.
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Review 6 for WD TV HD Media Player
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
55
Simple
Date: January 26, 2009
Written By:
JoelFrom: Holland, MI
Pros: true plug 'n play Cons: no album covers for avi files
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player The WD-TV is easy to use, and plays most file types. Album covers are supported for my music, but all my movies are AVI files and album covers are not supported for these files.
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Review 7 for WD TV HD Media Player
Overall Rating:
45
Performance:
45
Ease of Use:
35
Do the firmware update- you'll love it!!!
Date: December 25, 2008
Written By:
mkubotaFrom: Redwood City, CA
Pros: cheap, plays most video formats, firmware upgradable Cons: still could use a few firmware fixes
Reviews & Ratings for WD TV HD Media Player I bought this about a month ago and it was riddled with bugs depending upon what you were using it for. My primary use was to play DVD and BD backups. They just released their first firmware update and it is a HUGE improvement- enough to render most of the negatives others wrote about no longer true. Check out the firmware release notes on WD's site and keep in mind they threw in a few 'extras' not mentioned- namely VC-1 (WMV9AP) playback. In one day I went from "oh well, it was only $100" to considering getting another one for the bedroom. And WD promises continual development for this product/ line of products (one of their product development guys frequents blogs and forums) and they have backed it up! I have used a Maxtor IDE HD inside of a 3rd party enclosure and a WD MyBook Pro and have had no problems with the units interfacing with it. I can't wait for them to support DVD/BD menus- for now it's pretty much movie only.
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