Digital Trends

Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player January 2nd, 2009 | by Rachel Cericola

When it came to setup, the WD TV was basic plug and play. A monkey could set this thing up—all while roller skating and smoking a cigar. Plug in the power, hook up your HDMI cable and you’re almost in business. Assuming you have a separate hard drive, it’s probably already loaded with digital goodies. Most should be ready for viewing/listening right out of the gate. Just hook the hard drive’s USB cable into the WD TV box and start salivating.

And salivate you will, because there is some slight waiting involved while the WD TV scans through everything on the hard drive. It’s not go-make-a-sandwich painful, but depending on how packed your unit is, it can take a few minutes.

Once the hard drive is recognized, you can access music, videos and photos all from the menu on-screen. However, we did experience a few quirks. For instance, when using the iPod as our source, the WD TV changed all of the titles, making it a bit cumbersome to cruise through music. Somehow “ghie.m4a” was a more appealing name than “Grandmaster Flash.” Fortunately, if you have album artwork, you should be able to browse that way. It was sort of annoying, however, especially during playback, when it listed the next song as some complete gibberish.

Playback of all of the content was great overall, though. Music sounded excellent, and both photos and videos were sharp. No worries about anything getting washed out or stretched; the unit handled the transfer perfectly. In a few cases, we were unable to play home video or sound was missing. However, it was nothing that a little ArcSoft converter software couldn’t fix. Just don’t expect the software to cure everything that ails you. Western Digital states right on the side of the box that is does not support downloads from iTunes, Cinema Now, Movielink, Amazon Unbox and/or Vongo.

Navigating through the each of the screens was also fairly easy. However, we did need to consult the manual when it came to browsing through photos, as we didn’t really understand some of the option icons. The unit allows you to view individual folders as a slideshow. Another nice option was being able to playback any of the hard drive’s music during the photo viewing; you don’t have to choose one over the other.

Conclusion

Sure, no one needs the WD TV. Non-techies probably won’t see a need, and those amassing a fortune in digital content will likely prefer an Apple TV, VUDU or other set-top device. If not, well… they always seem to manage to get content to the TV, even without a dedicated go-between. Still, if you just want to share the occasional song or photo with a group of friends, the WD TV is easy to use and doesn’t ask you to sacrifice a lot of space—or, cheerfully, a lot of your A/V budget.

Image Courtesy of Western Digital