Western Digital TV Live

Introduction

A while ago we reviewed the WDTV, this is the next evolution of that product. Western Digital has crammed more features into this tiny device than I thought possible. The Western Digital TV Live sports the same UI as the WD TV Live Hub as well as adding a few new features. Read on to find out if you should upgrade your old media setup with the Western Digital TV Live.

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Specifications

File Formats Supported
Video – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9, FLV (h.264)
Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Audio – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS
Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitle – SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI
Note MPEG2 MP@HL up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30 or 1280x720p60 resolution. MPEG4.2 ASP@L5 up to 1280x720p30 resolution and no support for global motion compensation. WMV9/VC-1 MP@HL up to 1280x720p60 or 1920x1080p24 resolution. VC-1 AP@L3 up to 1920x1080i30, 1920x1080p24 or 1280x720p60 resolution. H.264 BP@L3 up to 720x480p30 or 720x576p25 resolution. H.264 MP@L4.1 and HP@4.1 up to 1920x1080p24, 1920x1080i30, or 1280x720p60 resolution. An audio receiver is required for multi-channel surround sound digital output. Compressed RGB JPEG formats only and progressive JPEG up to 2048×2048. Single layer TIFF files only. Uncompressed BMP only. For details, please refer to the user manual.
File Formats Not Supported
Does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes Store, Movielink, Amazon Unbox, and Vongo

 

Physical Specifications
	Interface	Ethernet, USB 2.0, HDMI, Composite A/V, Wi-Fi, Optical audio

 

Physical Dimensions
English
	Height	1.20 Inches
	Depth	3.9 Inches
	Width	4.90 Inches
	Weight	0.42 Pounds

 

Metric
	Height	30.0 mm
	Depth	100 mm
	Width	125.0 mm
	Weight	0.19 kg

 

Environmental Specifications
Temperature (English)
	Operating	41° F to 95° F
	Non-operating	-40° F to 149° F

 

Temperature (Metric)
	Operating	5° C to 35° C
	Non-operating	-40° C to 65° C

 

Electrical Specifications
Current Requirements
	Power Dissipation
	AC Input Voltage	100-240 VAC
	AC Input Frequency	50-60 Hz

The device is quite small and light. It’s so small and light that when all the wires are plugged in, it can sometimes be tipped backwards like an unbalanced see-saw. That’s something to look out for when installing it in your home entertainment setup.

A Closer Look

The outside of the box shows some of the services that the TV Live can access. Western Digital has a full list of accessible online services on their webpage. Inside we find the device nicely packaged and waiting to be put in our entertainment rack.

The front of the unit has a USB port for connecting either a flash drive or external hard drive. It also has an indicator light that will not only tell you when the device is on, but will let you know when it’s indexing files in the background. The back of the unit has all the rest of the connectors that make this device awesome. The HDMI and Optical connection take care of all of your high def audio needs, while the 3.5mm jack gives you legacy compatibility with composite connections. They’ve also thrown in an additional USB port in case the one on the front wasn’t enough.

We can see on the top of the unit, it sports its certifications.

UI

Western Digital has copied the UI that they used for the WD TV Live Hub. This isn’t a bad thing as the “Mochi” interface is quite nice. The layout is intuitive and shouldn’t give you any grief when trying to find a feature. One thing that I do find peculiar is that the on screen keyboard is in alphabetical order instead of a standard QWERTY layout. When the biggest complaint about the interface is that the on screen keyboard layout is in alphabetical order, you’re probably doing alright.

Remote

Because they reused the same interface from the Live Hub, it makes sense that they would reuse the remote as well. The button layout is laid out nicely. One complaint I do have is that the buttons seem a bit high up. It takes more effort to press a button than it does with other remotes. This is a real pain when you have to type something with the on screen keyboard. Fortunately the TV Live is compatible with USB keyboards so you can avoid this problem if it bothers you that much. The other solution is to pick up an IR universal remote and program it for the TV Live.

File Types

The Western Digital TV Live will play any format that the Hornettek Fantasy Media Player that we reviewed will play and then some. It’s not advertised on the box, but the device can even play ISO files of DVDs. This is a nice way to keep a digital archive of your DVDs, along with all the extras, and still be able to play them back without worrying about getting the disks scratched.

In our testing we sent a barrage of files at the device and it was able to play everything that we sent at it, including the subtitles and alternate audio tracks as well. It was even able to play back PGS subtitles (the kind found on Blu-ray releases). This is something that the Hornettek player wasn’t able to do. +1 point for Western Digital.

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Performance

For our performance testing, we try and stream video files of different resolutions while using both the wireless and wired connections. We then see if there is any noticeable frame skipping. Our test network is provided by an Asus RT-N16 running DD-WRT SVN revision 17201. The router is a single band wireless N router (this is fine as the TV Live is only a single band wireless N device) with gigabit Ethernet ports.

Resolution	Playable on Wireless	Playable on Wired
SD (640×480)	Yes	Yes
HD (1280×720)	Yes	Yes
HD (1920×1080)	No	Yes

Playing standard definition movies over wireless is a piece of cake. When we start throwing in the HD movies is when things get tricky. The TV Live was able to play back most 720p files that we tried over wireless without any issues. I say most because there was the rare noticeable frame skip. This can happen if the file has an unusually high bitrate or if your area has a lot of wireless interference from neighbors and such. My area has a high level of wireless interference and I credit the frame skips to that more than the ability of the device. Majority of people shouldn’t have any issue streaming 720p HD content to the TV Live if they have good signal. It is a different story when we try and play 1080p content. Anything after about a minute in length becomes an utter stutter fest and is unwatchable. When the device is plugged into a wired connection it is able to play any of the video formats without any issues.

Summary and Conclusion

This media player can play pretty much anything you can throw at it. I have now been spoiled into hating any device that can’t play as many formats as the TV Live. When it only costs around $100, can you blame me? Even though it may not be as customizable or powerful as a HTPC with something like XBMC running as a frontend, it is dead simple to use and has a lot of functionality. It’s like they took the Western Digital Live Hub and stripped out the 1TB drive and slapped in a wireless card instead. To top it all off they decided to shrink the whole thing down (you lose the composite connections, but not many people use those anyways). The lack of Amazon’s streaming video service is disappointing, but if Western Digital can work out a deal with Amazon, then there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from adding in the service with a firmware update, like they did to add Spotify support. It still has Netflix and Blockbuster streaming support to cover the major bases. This device has a lot of awesome features in a super small package. If you already have the TV Live Hub, you don’t really need to upgrade to this unless you’re really needing WIFI support, even then you can get a WIFI dongle that will give you the same feature. For any other device, you could do much worse than to pick this up.