WD TV HD Media Player

I love this product. Gone are the nights where I was the only person in the house capable of plugging the laptop to the HD TV with a 12ft miniDV<->HDMI cable and launching VLC -- dangling cords everywhere, draining batteries, and an inquisitive toddler.What sub $100, 1.5"x5" device can you get that sips electricity, is whisper quiet, boots instantaneously, auto-indexes 500GB of media files on FAT32, NTFS, HFS+ in < 2 minutes, and plays almost every file format including H.264, MKV, WMV9, FLAC, OGG, and DTS? None.Ages ago I used to rip divx and xvid movies onto a DVD and play them on a Philips DVD player. But now with huge HD file formats and oodles of cheap available external SATA USB storage I no longer have the patience to rip countless DVDs or encode movies such that I can play it on a BluRay player.There are other options I considered: configuring a MythTV box (no time), hacking an AppleTV with VLC, XBMC or Boxee (AppleTV chokes on 1080p), Popcorn Hour (shoddy reviews), etc. This is by far the easiest for my family and I to use.The system uses a Sigma SMP8635LF chipset. Sigma Designs is an American company based in California that makes system-on-a-chip (single integrated circuit) semiconductors for a vast array of media systems including 50% of all BluRay players on the market. This chip is responsible for decoding all the audio video codecs the Media Player supports. The chip handles 1080p fine with limitation (mentioned below).The unit is not perfect but I still give it 5 stars because of the price and out-of-box simplicity:Some issues (and some fixes):- Doesn't stream content from the net (without effort). There are other cheap devices for this -- a Roku, for example. If you run out of HDMI ports get an HDMI switch.- Initially had a problem with MKV with DTS audio not producing sound. The issue is that the unit can only decode in 2 channels and DTS has 5+ channels (depending on the variant). To-date the Media Player can't down-mix 5-channel to stereo. Resolution for me was output the DTS over the supplied optical port to my receiver (composite red-white cables won't work) and let the receiver handle the decoding. If this option is not available one could convert DTS to AC3 (a quick Google will yield easy recipes for both Mac, Windows, Linux users).- Frames-per-second (fps). WD is clear about what the device can handle. These are the limitations for MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9:1920x1080p at 24fps1920x1080i at 30fps1280x720p at 60fpsIf you breach that then movies will pixelate and skip frames. Solution for me is to re-encode the movie using Handbrake at the max fps supported by the unit. For example, if I had a 1080p movie at 29.97 fps I would just reencode it at 24fps. Problem disappears.- Thumbnail images. "Thumbnail mode" is more attractive and polished looking than "list mode" which simply lists the movie title. While it's relatively easy to embed images in, say, mp4 or avi, it is not possible with mkv. As such all my mkv movies initially had a lame default thumbnail assigned to them. Luckily the latest firmware addresses this. Place a jpeg image in the same directory and with the same name as the mkv file and the Media Player will display the thumbnail. I grab DVD cover art right from our friend Amazon. Works perfectly.For example:Defiance - 1080p.mkvDefiance - 1080p.jpgOther miscellaneous things I can think of:- Works great with my Logitech Harmony remote.- Handles (2) WD Passport drives with power over USB just fine.- Plays BluRay streams perfectly - just copy the .m2ts file over to your usb drive and enjoy!- To-date, chapter support is only available with MKV files. Adding chapters to a file can be accomplished using a tool such as MKVMerge. Otherwise, aside from fast-forwarding rates at 2/4/8/16x, it is possible to skip forward (not reverse) in 10-minute increments by first selecting fast-forward (>>) then skip (>>|).- The unit has problems indexing HFS+ with journaling enabled (I have a Mac). It will still play the media but it's easy enough to turn off journaling. With the USB drive plugged into the Mac type:$ sudo /usr/sbin/diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/Your_Drive

This thing is great!!! I've only had it for a short while, but so far it's amazing. I debated between this and the Apple TV (and IOmega, but IOmega was out of the running soon), and decided to go with this because you can hook up an external HD and it reads many, many different formats. While Apple TV does have a better interface (they've been doing this a lot longer), it only reads the H.264, MPEG-4 and MP3. Plus the Apple TV has pretty small HD (40GB for the one that cost $225)and is essentially meant to stream stuff from your main computer which means it's not portable. People have been able to connect HDs to Apple TV, but anytime you alter an Apple product, you risk voiding the warrant, and I think one of the best features of Apple is their warrant [By the way, I own both Apple (laptop)and PC (desktop) and I like them both for different reasons]. Anyway, back to WD - I love it and think it's great. So far, it has played everything flawlessly. If it dies within a year, it's covered under warrant. If it breaks after a year, I've gotten a year out of it and it was less than half the price of Apple TV. Besides, by that time there may be a better one out (hopefully by WD because I am their fan, I have 3 My Books and 2 Passport Elites) with an interface similar to Apple's, with pretty icons and fun ways to view them. Good luck to you, whatever you choose, and thanks WD for making this product - keep up the good work! Thanks Amazon for a good price and free shipping!Addendum Sept 16, 2009:I feel the need to add to my prior review. I do still like the product, but I've had to return it - twice. The first one would freeze-up after being left on for a period of time. I called WD support which was useless as they told me to change the batteries in the remote (duh! already did that). Amazon replaced it, but the replacement had a flaw - normal and widescreen setting were reversed (i.e. if you want widescreen, needed to set it to normal and vise versa). Not a fatal flaw, but definitely annoying. I called WD and they offered to replace it, but with a refurbished one. Since I bought it new and it was only 2 days old, I didn't think I should have to settle for a refurbish unit. I called Amazon and I returned the replacement.I am very disappointed, mostly in Western Digital Customer Support. As I stated above, I have 5 WD HDs and I very much liked the media player, but I'm not sure I will buy WD again. I haven't had a problem with my HDs which are all fairly new(less than 1 yr old), but based on my 2 interactions with Western Digital Customer Support regarding the media player, it would seem that if you have a problem with any of their products, it too bad for you. I may have been able to overlook their lack of support if the media player had been more than a nano-second old, but it was brand-new and they should have offered me a new replacement. It's not a high-end piece of equipment, but it's not unreasonable to expect to get a years worth of use out of it.