Western Digital is best known for their hard drive offerings, most notably their successful MyBook series of drives (which I, for one, am a big fan of). But it would seem that WD has realized that lots of people are storing gigs and gigs of media on their drives without an easy way to go from storing said media on an external drive to watching that movie on a big screen TV. Enter the WD TV HD Media Player, whose sole goal is to make that happen.
As Macworld’s own Jonathan Seff reports in his First Look, the WD TV is a bridge between your USB hard drive and your TV. Plunk the WD TV near your TV, hook it up using either HDMI or composite interfaces, plug in your USB hard drive (I’m sure the folks at Western Digital would prefer you use one of their drives, but the WD TV supports other USB mass storage devices including cameras and camcorders), and enjoy your media on the big screen.
The WD TV supports HD playback up to 1080p in a host of different video formats (MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)), and it also supports a number of popular audio formats (MP3, WMA, OGG (for you hippies), WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA). Of course, the WD TV won’t playback any media that has DRM on it (including videos and some music from the iTunes store), so if you’re looking for an iTunes Store-friendly set top box the Apple TV is still the way to go.
The WD TV does have some neat tricks to offer. You can attach two USB drives at one time and the WD TV will index the content on both drives and display the media in one collection. You can also run slideshows of your photos right off of your camera.
All of this for $130, so what’s the catch? The biggest drawback that I can see, other than that Fisher-Price-looking remote, is that there is no way to manage your media on the device itself. In order to add new movies/music you need to grab your hard drive and hook it up to a computer. Seems like a hassle to me, but if you store your media library on an external USB drive the WD TV looks like a winner.
