WDTV Media Player

I purchased the WDTV HD Media Player unit probably two weeks ago now and it is proving to be a good investment. Primarily because I got tired of exporting mkv files through Quicktime so that the PS3 could read them, and the fact the PS3 doesn’t read my HFS+ formatted HDD.

Even then, if it did manage to read the HDD, it probably wouldn’t play half the files. Adding to this, I really didn’t want to run 8 metres of Optical Audio cable and HDMI across my lounge room floor, so the WDTV was the ideal solution.

The WDTV itself is pretty much the “middle man” between your TV and a HDD. You simply plug the unit into your TV using HDMI or the older Composite A/V cabling, plug your HDD into the unit and huzzah, you can now view your photos, music and videos on the TV with a few simple clicks.

What mostly made me buy the WDTV is the specifications. It uses HDMI, Optical Audio output, has support for various HDD formats including NFS+, NTFS, FAT, has a decent looking, yet functional user interface and plays a broad range of file formats:

Music – mp3, wma, ogg, wav/pcm/lpcm, aac, flac, dolby digital, aif/aiff, mka
Photos – jpeg, gif, tif/tiff, bmp, png
Video -mpeg1/2/4, wmv9, avi (mpeg4, xvid, avc), h.264, mkv, mov (mpeg4, h.264), mts, tp, ts
Playlist – pls, m3u, wpl
Subtitle -srt (utf-8), smi, sub, ass, ssa

As I do watch a fair bit of Japanese anime and the fact most releases are in mkv format, the support for this format was important. With the 1.01 firmware update WD added further functionality and improvement to the playback of mkv files, perhaps dozens of anime crazed fans emailed them.

The general playback of video is smooth, most of the video files I’m playing are either avi, large mp4’s or 720p mkv, but I notice no jittery or lagged processing. The fast forward and rewind functions work to a decent speed, nothing extremely fast but it’s good. The WDTV also supports resuming of playback, so you don’t have to start all over when powering the device off.

Overall, the WDTV is a great little unit, but it does have a few minor annoyances: The UI while looking good, is a bit laggy.. probably only by a few milliseconds, but it’s noticeable. Sometimes the HDD can take a minute or two to initialise, (significantly decreased from 1.02.10 firmware). I’ve found on occasion I’ve had to power the device on and off for it to be recognised. There could be a few more options for audio setup as well. I use Optical Audio on the device, yet I need to mute the TV as the WDTV plays the audio through both HDMI and the Optical Audio – you should be able to select only one method of output in my opinion. Additionally, while it is not an annoyance I’d like to be able to turn off the music and photo menu options as I’d never use these two.

update 13th August – Reference Frame fail. Well, it appears the unit suffers to play H.264 encoded 1080p content that is greater than 5rf, resulting in artifacts all over the screen. I’ve learnt this after trying to watch a Gundam 00 episode in 1080p, which uses 9rf (ridiculously high?)

update 10th August – OSD mod: Simple and Unadorned. Tired of the standard WDTV OSD? Well thanks to the hacking scene, people have been able to design custom OSD’s. Over the weekend I installed one designed by Lilibabe from the WDTV Forums which I thought looked pretty sweet. Check it out here. The good thing about this mod is that you can use the standard WDTV firmware. Simply download the the 1.02.10 firmware and use the wdtv.ver file from it along with the wdtv.bin from Lilibabe. If you’re already on 1.02.10, you’ll need to open the wdtv.ver file and adjust the version to say 1.02.11 so that it’ll read as a new firmware update when you plug it into the unit.

update 2nd August – 1.02.10 firmware. The only really noticeable thing with with this firmware is the time taken to detect your HDD. On older firmware versions, it took 30 seconds to 1 minute, sometimes longer. After updating to 1.02.10, it’s approximately 2-3 seconds!

update 20th June – 1.02.08 firmware. Great success! After doing some googling I found a prerelease of the 1.02.08 firmware which adds support for vorbis audio. Now some of my anime titles have audio.

update 6th June – 1.02.07 firmware. So I upgraded my firmware to the latest that was available on the WD website. Was rather excited as a included update was more audio formats for the mkv container. I was hopeful that this would sort out the lack of audio from some anime titles I have, but no joy.. still the Japanese 1 (unsupported) text.

update 3rd Feburary, 2010 – OSD Mod: Picto. In November of 2009 Lilibabe released another high quality OSD Mod, this time titled Picto and I have to say it’s my favourite so far. Check it out here.

This article was posted on April 1, 2009 at 10:47 am  |  Filed in tv  |  11 comments have been made.

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