Western Digital TV Live Hub

Testing setup

Western Digital Live Hub Specs

What makes the WD TV Live Hub so different from other players is not just the addition of Internet media streaming, the limited NAS functionality, or the plethora of supported media formats, but the combination of the lot combined in a small quiet package that can fit in with any home entertainment center.  Most ” All in one media packages” offer very little of one of these packages. Take for example the Popcorn Hour PCH-C200 which offers very similar functionality. I works reliably as a media player but only barely has Internet media streaming. The PCH-C200 can be a NAS and in some regards better than the WD Live Hub due to an extra SATA port. The WD Live Hub has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to being a network player though, in both Windows and OS X after a quick walk through you can click local media and send it directly to the Live Hub for immediate playing by streaming from your local PC. The Live hub also works with other Western Digital Live devices to stream to multiple points on a network. With the price being $100 cheaper and locally available at retailers the Live Hub is obviously superior especially considering the popcorn hour uses a similar chipset as well.

User Interface

The user interface on the WD TV Live Hub is far superior to any of the previous UI’s supplied in the past renditions of the WD TV series. The current iteration is closer to that of a skinned HTPC than that of a traditional set top box. Overall the UI is smooth with very few pauses or hiccups even when streaming to several devices.

One of the nice features, and one you see request a lot by the communities backing various media streamers is a built in scraper for meta data regarding local and networked media. The one baked into the Live hub is rater nice in giving basic plot summary as well as pulling the artwork for each file. The data for the scraper is stored in XML files instead of the more traditional .NFO files but this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. It took about an hour or so to complete scraping of around 600 movies during the scraping I the Live hub was still useable and in fact allowed playing of video, this is something not usually feasible by most devices on the market.

While my camera did not capture this to the best possible way  I assure you that when viewed normally this info is quite readable.  You can apply personal ratings on movies as well as set them as favorites or place them in a queue for future watching.

The only real limitation I have found with the Live Hub’s scraping UI. The UI will not handle TV shows, it will take thumbnails if you set them up but it will not auto scrape them.

While I did not have a Roku box handy to test against I used the PlayStation 3 for Netflix testing. Ideally you would think the PlayStation to be vastly superior to the WD TV Live Hub, but in practice the Live Hub comes out as a smoother and speedier experience when transitioning between shows. Both devices offer the same content and the same support of 5.1 surround and HD quality on videos.

Overall I had great success with all the files I used. With the exception being a DVD I ripped using MakeMKV which although the codec (Mpeg2 ) and the container (MKV) were both labeled as supported the file would not play. This appears to be an isolated issue as other files that were encoded using the same software played just fine. I Played 1080p files with a high bit rate with no problems what so ever. My only pain point during the entire test was getting newly added files to show up. Apparently when you have Media Library on you need to power off the device then start it back up to refresh the database, afterward all the new files show up just fine. This is a non issue if you don’t update your files frequently or plan to shut the device down all the way. Alternatively you can shut off the media scraper and it wont care about updating each time you change files.

One final point I want to make is that although the Live hub works as a NAS it is not a true NAS and will not support file transfer over 12MB a second which can be very frustrating when transferring a massive collection of movies. This transfer rate is more than capable of handling HD streaming, even to two devices but It will not be the be all end all for your home entertainment. I felt this was a bit of  a low blow by Western Digital when you say you support Gigabit you should actually support those transfer speeds.

Web interface

As long as you have the Live Hub in at least standby you can access the web interface via password ( by default “admin” ) This web interface allows you to change the settings for the Twonky media server as well as the iTunes server. There are also drive status tools and support for a web based remote available to this web UI.

The entire web interface is very clean and is supported in both the android browser as well as iOS.

Related

  Previous Page         1. Introduction2. Closer look3. Analysis and testing4. Summary and Conclusion5. View All         Next Page