Western Digital Live 1080p Internet Media Streamer Television

Possibly the media pirate's perfect movie and music streamer

Yesterday, Western Digital officially announced the second generation of their WD TV HD media player. In our review of the original device, we loved its ability to play back almost any video we tossed at it, but lamented its inability to handle encrypted media files. Since then, Western Digital has issued a series of firmware updates that improve format compatibility (including DivX), but the new WD TV Live adds new hardware features as well. Most notable is the addition of an Ethernet port to connect the WD TV Live to your home network. That means you can not only stream movies from your desktop PC or NAS boxes to the WD TV Live, but also get video, music, and photo content from the internet. We received a retail sample of the new system, and tested it to see if these new features are worth the $50 price bump.

First, a quick briefing on how the WD TV Live and its previous iteration work. The WD TV system is a media player, but video and music files aren't stored on the device itself. You connect USB hard drives or flash keys to either of the two USB ports on the back and the top of the player, and the WD TV reads files off of those storage drives to play onto a connected television or monitor. The first WD TV launched with support for most standard video formats (MPEG, WMV, H.264), 1080p resolution and high-bitrate playback, and used HDMI or Composite video connections. Its support for community-adopted video containers, like MKV and H.264 AVI files, made it a popular alternative to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for media playback.

In addition, the firmware for the WD TV has been open source, which has led to 3rd-party firmware updates that have added neat functionality to the player, including USB optical drive and limited network adapter support. The WD TV Live utilizes new internal hardware, so it's unclear that existing 3rd-party firmware will run on it.

The WD TV Live's packaging is very similar to the original's. Included in the box is the player (which is about the size of a portal hard drive, only thicker), an IR remote, AAA batteries, power adapter, and video cables. The box includes both Composite and Component cables, though they're cables with 3.5mm jacks on one end to plug into the WD TV. Neither the first WD TV nor the WD TV Live include an HDMI cable, though everyone knows they're relatively cheap to buy from monoprice.com.

Also new is a warning sticker on the back of the WD TV Live, reminding you not to stack USB hard drives on top of the player. In our experience, the player gets pretty hot when playing back 1080p video, though we've never had one of these devices die on us from overheating. Still, it's a good idea to keep the player on its side during use, and avoid placing it on top of or around other hot gadgets.