New WDTVLive
For those of you whom don’t know what the WDTV or WDTV-Live is, I will give you the basic idea.. actually.. scratch that.
If you don’t know what a WDTV is, go here and check out the details.. why re-invent the wheel eh?
REVIEW
Well I should start by saying that I got it on sale as it was regularly $149.99 but I got it for $129.99 plus tax so it came to about $147 total CAD to my door. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me, very happy with that price. I got it from NCIX.com the day after it was released.
I opened it up (on my lunch break of course), and set it up to my Plasma and old Kenwood receiver. I didn’t have time to screw around with adding the shares (thank god as you’ll learn later), but I tested out YouTube and played a few files from my Passport USB Drive and all worked great! Extremely excited about this new device.
I’ve been waiting for a device that I could use to play (stream) high definition movies and bluray movies from my computer upstairs for quite some time. I can honestly say that this little device does exactly what I want it to. However, I did run into some snags. Firstly, since I’m running Windows 7, it has a funky media library built in which I figured I’d use since the WDTV recognizes it as a media library. The problem with that is, the media library doesn’t recognize .mkv files which is the format a lot of high definition files come in. No problem, the WDTVLive also has a ‘network shares’ option which I figured would be easy to setup.
Wrong.
I shared my drives on my Windows 7 machine that gave permissions to ‘Guest’, I then turned on the Guest User and figured the network shares would show up downstairs in the WDTVLive (it did after all detect that we had two computers on the network). Unfortunately, the shares didn’t show up, and no matter how many times I screwed around with them, it would always give the error ‘no media in folder’. GRRRR!!
Looking online, I see that I’m not the only one with this kind of error, it seems a lot of Windows 7 users were having that problem, the good news is that there is someone one has a lot of knowledge with regards to the original WDTV, and in fact.. he turned his WDTV (regular) into one that could access the internet through a USB network card! (Holy smart!). Anyhow, I found instructions to upgrading the firmware which actually adds a lot of functionality to the device at his website here and decided to try it.
It was really simple to do, all I had to do was download his firmware, put it on a usb key (formatted to FAT32) and then put it in the device and run it.. it sees it as a new firmware and after installing it, restarts and you can tell it worked since the background is changed (a lot nicer), and some of the startup images, etc are different. Cool.
After some tinkering via Telnet, I was able to get my network drives running without issue.. but I have to ask.. why the hell do I have to do all of this? God help me if I was a rookie who just bought the device and wanted to use it with Windows 7 and High Definition files!
By the way, all the tinkering and information that I used (my nickname is lencurrie) can be found at the WDTVhd forums.
Now to sum up, I’m extremely happy with my WDTVLive device (now that I have network shares working).. I can load up my computer upstairs with media.. and have them all play downstairs via a tiny little box which connects to my computer up here. It’s pretty much exactly like XBMC without the great user interfact XBMC has. The fact of the matter is though, I was considering going out and getting an entire Home Media PC.. so I definitely saved some money going this route, and it does exactly what I want it to.
Another note, B-Rad and the developers of WDLXTV are BRILLIANT! They’ve turned this tiny little box into something much, much more user friendly with additions such as apple trailers, the ability to use an external optical drive, ftp servers, web interfaces, etc, etc. If you’re a bit of a geek (like me) you’d be crazy not to experiment with the new firmware they put out.. once you get it going the way you want it to, it’s very rewarding. I certainly can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to use anything like the age old DVD/VCR Combo units you can find all over the place. To be honest, it’s been months since I’ve burned off a DVD or even thought about it… that’s what’s great about this device. A++ rating from me!