This was given to me a few months ago by Sarah to test and review for Girlygeekdom, after the Western Digital event. First of all, apologies for not reviewing this earlier, my house move pretty much killed any time I had end of last year. After doing some unpacking, I found it hidden amongst all my other tech in the gadgets box. I’ve been looking forward to testing this out properly; I currently own the original WD TV and it still works a treat. The thing that it lacked was network connectivity, so it was nice to see this feature added to this iteration.
Initial installation and setup
Setup was a breeze as I have come to expect from their WD TV series; the usual fare of optical out and HDMI is included as standard. I plugged in the network cable and set the IP address information in the settings. Looks good so far, went through the menu to Video and then Network Shares. Sure enough, all my shares were visible on my Shuttle PC, which acts as a file and media server. I wanted to test MKV movie playback with a particular file, it wasn’t on my Shuttle so I powered on my laptop to copy it across. And now… I can’t access the Shuttle network shares anymore. Power cycling the unit yielded the same result I even changed its IP address, it refuses to go further to get to the shares! It literally stopped working on the fly without me making any changes on the Shuttle. It does however still see the Shuttle listed as a network device. Very peculiar… so off I went to the Western Digital website to get the latest firmware.
The firmware upgrade process is extremely easy; download it, extract the files into the root of a USB hard drive and plug it into the back of the WD TV Live. It finds the firmware immediately and you will see an option to upgrade. Sit back and relax, while it does its thing.
Features and interface
While the update is processing as I write this, let me talk about what you get. The first thing I noticed was that there was an option to link a Pandora Radio account to it, which I found rather odd. Pandora is only available in the U.S, so perhaps we were given an American unit to test with. Or, the guys at Western Digital have not regionalised the WD TV Live to suit different parts of the world. You also get YouTube playback, Flickr access and even Facebook. You can also access your photos offline without Flickr. Western Digital obviously want the WD TV Live to act as a hub online as well as offline.
Also, if you have media servers such as Windows Media Center, it can see those as well to play back your videos or music. If you enable DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) on your NAS storage device, it will play back the media on there. Another cool thing is you can setup a Ubuntu server with Samba shares and uPNP enabled to do streaming.
The menus are really easy to navigate, but the old issues from the past generation still exists but not as prevalent in this one. And that is the slight pause on certain menu options as you select different ones. I am probably being picky about this, as it is pretty slick jumping from menu to menu but there are odd occasions when it just pauses for a second.
Playback
The network shares issue is still there after the firmware upgrade; resetting to factory defaults made no difference. My only guess is, there is something in my network setup at home it doesn’t like… even though I have a flat gigabit network. So to test playback I will be using a USB drive connected directly to the WD TV Live.
Video
My test videos will be Code Geass R2 – Lelouch of the Rebellion, one of my favourite animes, and The Inbetweeners which I ripped from DVD. Nearly all my anime is ripped and encoded in H264 within a MKV container. I have a lot and there is no way I am going to be swapping out DVDs after every episode.
Code Geass R1 – Lelouch of the Rebellion. Episode 1
Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 1280×720 23.98fps
Audio: Vorbis 48000Hz stereo
Subtitle: Advanced SubStation Alpha
Container: MKV
As expected, it played the video without any issues and the subtitles were displayed intact. There have been issues with subtitling before on their older models, on rare occasions, and they would not be displayed correctly. Another issue with the first generation was that when you pressed play, there would be a slight pause as it tried to read the file before displaying on the screen (especially for H264 video). I am happy to report this is not the case anymore. A nice feature is that if you highlight a video from the list, a small preview window on the right will play.
The Inbetweeners -Season 1, Episode 1
Video: Xvid 640×352 25.00fps
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz stereo 131Kbps
Container: AVI
This is the easier video to play out of the two; a lower resolution and an AVI container which pretty much everything out there can handle. Even though it was not in HD, it still played well and actually looked rather good even at 640 resolution.
Music
The WD TV Live can play all kinds of music formats, any device can play back MP3 but for me I am going to test in FLAC. FLAC is a lossless codec which I use very frequently, especially for encoding classical music when every instrument requires crystal clarity.
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons. Concerto No.1 “Spring”
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 728kbps
Codec: FLAC
Encoding: Lossless
Ahh this sounds absolutely lovely; the way I have my sound setup is to have a seperate optical out for sound that goes through the amp. I know HDMI can do sound too but well, I am very particular about this sort of thing. There were no stuttering issues or anything, it was pretty flawless during playback so thumbs up.
Conclusion
They have added a lot of new features in comparison to the first generation I have. It still plays everything under the sun and they have ironed out some niggles which I am happy about. Admittedly, I was rather disappointed that I only got the network shares feature working briefly before it stopped working altogether. I hope that this is because of the test model we received. The addition of wifi I think would be nice; even their top of the range WD TV Live Hub does not have wireless built in, but I am sure this is something they will work towards.
The addition of DLNA is a welcome feature, and it is good to know that the boys at Western Digital have interoperability in mind. The question is, would I upgrade? For me personally, no. I think the addition of WIFI would swing it for me, but the pricing point for the WD Live TV is quite competitive at £99.99. If you are a new buyer, you can’t really go wrong with this. It supports a lot of open source codecs, very easy to use and provides a bridge to all your other devices in your home.
About Motoko
First embraced the inner geek at the age of 10 with a Commodore 64 and programming in BASIC. Avid PC gamer, Gundam Gunpla builder, manga editor and anime enthusiast. Loves Mountain Dew and Ghost in the Shell. Twitter: @Motoko_K
