Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 75
 A Fantastic Device!! September 6, 2010
Karl
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I purchased this device mainly to be able to play movies through my TV without having to hook my laptop up to the TV. But I found the device does so much more. Instant streaming movies through Netflix, looking at pictures stored on a USB drive or a shared drive through my home network. I can even access my youtube account via this device. It works best if you have an HDMI cable to your TV. I highly recommend this for the geek in all of us.
THIS LITTLE THING IS AWESOME!!! September 6, 2010
delta_grimes
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This has been by far the coolest thing I've bought for my living room since we got a couhc and a widescreen! It plays all of my movies, and I have it coupled to a WD 2TB Hard Drive that also rocks. This box easily accesses my over 700 Movie files, pictures and music with grace and plays them flawlessly. I love it and plan on buying another one for the bedroom.
 Did what we expected well September 6, 2010
Paul Avery (Fort Collins, CO United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This device is a great option for people who travel, including RV users - just connect it to any TV via HDMI or component cables. The playback quality of MP4 files is good, even on our 50" plasma TV, and we have not seen the out-of-sync sound problems reported here. The user interface also seems fine to me but is not 100% intuitive.
 A good device that could be much better. September 5, 2010
File (Oneida, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
OK, so I give this device three stars, not because I don't like what it does, but because it could have been SOOOO much better. I'm writing this review after having it for a couple of months.
The Good. It does the basics well:
-plays videos from my collection of AVIs, h264, MP4, MKVs, mpeg, VOB and FLVs, photos and music (Others have had trouble with playing MP4 -- I've not seen that).
-MediaFly integration works well, allows you to play videos from local USBs (small ones at least -- I'm not sure about large drives yet) and network shares. I've not tested it with a media server yet.
- It plays DVD ISOs, though not DVDs that have been ripped to the hard drive as files (more about this later).
These are the things I most wanted to do with it when I bought it, and it does them. I recommend you buy one of these if this is the sort of thing you want to do.
However, there are a lot of things that it could do a lot better (and I'm sure future versions will). This is a list of things I hope they fix/improve in the next version (or with a firmware update).
- When you open the box, there's a license agreement sticker that says by opening you agree to the license on line (WTF). I bought this thing, I didn't license it!
- It takes a long time to boot.
- The remote control interface leaves A LOT to be desired. There's an annoying inconsistency between when you use the "Navigation buttons" at the top of the remote, and the "video control buttons in the middle", and the "back button" (white button on the left). It would be nice if they had separate "YouTube", MediaFly", "Netflix, "Server", "Shares" and "USB" Buttons. The default buttons highlights could be much more intuitive (e.g. Sign in should start on "OK", rather than making me hit four different buttons to get there).
-For Shares and Server at least, I wish I could identify favorites, so that I could jump to them immediately, rather than having to navigate to them.
-Doesn't play .WMV videos
- Putting in strong passwords is very painful. At least for YouTube, MediaFly, they remember them (though they should preposition the cursor to make it simpler to navigate).
- YouTube navigation is limited and painful, but you can mitigate this by using the "Save To" feature in YouTube to find items that act as a jumping off point. By expanding your YouTube Saves, its entirely tolerable, except for music videos
- Many YouTube music videos have "Play on TV devices" disabled. This is very annoying. I found that when I uploaded .WMV files to youtube to watch them on my WD device, YouTube flagged them as "not viewable on Televisions" by default. The only way around the "Not viewable on televisions" I've found is to download the videos themselves directly to your computer and put them in a shared area, so you can play them directly from your hard drive (either as .FLV ro MP4 for instance). I use the "VideoDownload Helper" Plugin for FireFox to download then sometimes convert the videos to MP4, so that I can watch them on my television. When I want to just download the MP3, I use the Video2MP3 Firefox plugin. Both put a button right on your YouTube Page to allow you to download the videos.
- It occasionally looses the ability to play videos. The way to fix this is to turn it off and back on. This doesn't happen often (once a week?) and might be related to my router.
- If you change the IP address of your device, you need to go through a tribulation to get a new address.
- When you turn the device off, it forgets what you were last doing, though it doesn't forget all of your password info. The cure is to leave it on all the time.
- I've occasionally had troubles with HD video stalling out on the device. This is not a network connectivity, or the NAS hard drive problem, since I can play those same videos on other computers, and all is good. It might be a problem with the way the video is encoded which the WD device can't handle and it might be a problem with the device. However, I also have a couple of videos that won't play on the computer, but do play on the WD device. This has been a minor inconvenience so far, since fast forwarding a bit then rewinding fixes it.
- The ability to rip a dvd, put it on the network, and watch it with the WD Live device is nice, but I often rip DVDs as a series of files, as a prelude to converting them to MKV with HandBrake. As such, it would e very nice if it would read DVDs as part of a directory (as Media Player Classic does). This would clearly be pretty easy for them to do.
Overall, I don't know of a better device (looks better than the Roku), but it could be much better.
 Wait to buy... September 5, 2010
Mario A. Trujillo
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
First things first. Make sure you are aware that there are some major issues with this unit when it comes to .MKV files. It surprises me that WD hasn't been sued for this. On the box it clearly states the ability to play MKV files. But it has so many issues that it should at least have an asterisk next to it. The menu system is sometimes slow and non responsive. And the only way to get it to function correctly is to turn off the unit then turn it back on. But reading on web sites, this could be due to the dreaded MKV file that the player doesn't like. So until WD gets this resolved, I say wait. Save your money and who knows. Maybe something better will be released...
Showing reviews 1-5 of 75
|
![AmazonBasics High-Speed HDMI Cable (6.5 Feet/2.0 Meters) [Supports 3D + Audio Return Channel]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B001T9NUJE.01._AA75_PU_PU-5_.jpg)
