It does not look like this device plays ISO files. This is why I just ordered the popcornhour device. Hope to have it this week to try out.

Dave

I just received mine and it's pretty cool All the DVD's i ripped onto my HD look great!!! Now I just need to find out how I can get high def movies on to my harddrive to watch.

any suggestions?

So i guess the next step is does anyone know any software that would convert my itunes movies / shows so i can watch them on this thing?

Ok so I've had a week to play with it. I have ripped all my dvd's onto my harddrive and they play GREAT. The only issue i have is that I can't play AVI files unless i use the software given on a CD to convert it. I'm not really understanding why it wont play AVI from the start. That's a very common file type for footage you capture from a camera.

Greg, avi is a 'container' that can support footage compressed using a wide variety of compression formats. The player has to have the appropriate algorithms to decode each type of compressed footage - for example mjpeg (motion-jpeg), DV, Divx, and so on...

So the CD software you have is using a codec supported by your player, whereas your other avis' codec isn't supported.

There a freeware utility called GSpot that can determine the codec for an avi: Super Quick Start

Yes, but I want to be able to just play and play, you know what i mean? Having to convert these files that play fantastic on my computer is annoying. I tried to play a window media file a few days ago and it wouldn't. This means I have LOTS of files to convert. It should play AVI and WM files with no problem. Also another question is, when i convert these files with the given software does it take away some quality? I noticed a file went from 500mb to 430mb.

I've been playing AVIs with no issues. Have you updated the firmware to 1.01? That might be the issue.

Yeah I thought i did. I put the update on the harddrive and it updated when i played it. Should I do it again? I hope I didn't do it wrong but it seems like I have.

Yes, the video plays back fine, looks great. However, it says the audio is unsupported and you get no sound.

I have found that my WD player will not play what you might define as 'intraframe' AVIs -like standard DV, or Canopus HQ files for example - although it's quite happy to play Xvid or Divx 'AVIs'.
It also plays DVD ISO files fine.

My WD is loaded up with a bunch of different AVIs and they all play fine with the exception of 1 TV show where I get a message "Audio channel 1 not supported" although the video still plays, just without sound.
I usually encode my DVD collection to h.264 with mp3 audio in an AVI file, plays fine and looks great. Most of the TV series I have downloaded are a combination of divx, xvid aac mp3 etc, and they all work fine.
I can confirm the unit won't play ISO image files, but when you can have the same quality in a smaller h.264 file why fill your hard drive unnecessarily? Also this means all my movies are under 4Gb so I can leave my hard drive formatted as Fat32 and can plug it into Mac and PC (unlike NTFS where a Mac can only read data, not write)
For blueray or HD I would recommend encoding to a HD h.264 file (which is one of the blueray standard formats anyway). The WD supports HD.

Hmm, if you did it already then it should be fine. I agree with Roger now that I think about it, the AVIs I have downloaded and worked have been xvid and divx.

So how does one get their blu-ray disk image into an h,264 file? I have a blu-ray burner, and AnyDVD HD and have ripped entire Blu-ray disks to my PC hard drive. It is stored in a folder using the same exact directory structure as a bluray. I can use PowerDVD to point to this directory and it plays, but exploring the directory leads to no specific movie file, just hundred of .mkv files. I assume these contain the movie but how do I know what to do with them?

People have posted that it works and plays blu-ray files but nobody has answered how or what exactly that are doing to achieve this.

Thanks.

I don't know what kind of AVI's I have. Most are clips I have capture onto my computer from my DVX100 and others are movie movie files from Premier.

Should I redo my update?

What I did is download the update, extracted the Zipped folder and plugged it in.

something strange I noticed yesterday. I got an HDMI cable and watched some HD files I had. I set all the settings correct but when i tried to watch an SD movie it stretches the image out and I didn't want it in the "full screen" mode. I think you should be able to choose what format you want it in without switching from video 1 to video 6 like on my tv now.

> I don't know what kind of AVI's I have.

Yeah, well, that what GSpot can do for you. See my earlier post.

If I downloaded HD movies from XBOX live and saved them onto my external HD, would i be able to play them on my tv?

I'm just trying to find ways for getting HD movies I purchase onto it. I know itunes is a no go and I dont want to go out and buy a blueray burner.

I just love this Little device, I recently jumped into the HD arena and bought the WD mediaplayer to show my clients what a wedding could look like on their lcd.
Today was my first wedding client who had a very large lcd and I connected the WD player with hdmi to their tv and used a usb stick that contained a 10 min mpg2 file (1440x1080 -18mbs) and it looked sharp as a razorblade and put my regular dvd to shame. (showed that as well to them on their dvd player)

They were well aware about the limitations of their lcd with a normal signal, their non HD tv channels also looked like crap on their lcd. They did not have a BR player yet so I will have to supply regular dvd's (also for family and friends) but I will supply them with a mpg2 file with the same quality I showed them, probably with a higher bitrate on a usb or external harddrive which they supply me. in that way they can play it on their pc of mediaplayer if they have one or just safekeep it to have it transfered to BR when they buy one later.

being able to show my clients HD on their lcd, if they don't have a BR player yet is a big advantage for me, other videographers can also say they deliver in HD but I'm sure that I"m one of the few that is able to also show it to my clients that don't have HD players yet.

This is one of my best and cheapest investments yet.

Well my initial tests with blu-ray files didn't work. I grabbed the main m2ts files from the blu-ray image and copied to my portable drive. The WD unit sees the files and plays the video portion but tells me that the audio stream is not supported. I am going to try a different blu-ray since this one has DOlby True-HD.

So ripping blue ray movies and playing them on the unit doesn't work? I almost bought a blueray external player for my computer just for this purpose but I will hold off and wait for other to figure out way to gets HD on it.

thanks

others say they have it working. I was able to play the main video with no audio. The WD player doesn't support true hd audio I guess.

How were others able to do it, maybe different ripping software?

today stripped the .m2v (mpeg2 video stream) directly from EX1 file and played fine on the WD HD TV from a USB key (Corsair Flash Voyager).
I think the perfect combination would be the 16gig Corsair Flash voyager GT (twice faster) with the WD HD TV.

The m2v was extracted from the .MXF file with the free Snell&Wilcox converter (don't know what to do with audio , since the .AES format is not recognized by none of my audio software), itself extracted from the BPAV folder with the Sony Clip Browser.
rendering is perfect...

I think the issue is that the Dolby AC3 audio is 5.1 and is piped output the optical output for an external decoder. If you don't have a Dolby audio receiver, you have to reencode the audio to another format and remux. I haven't done this yet, either.

I did this also. For the audio, I first rendered an AC3 5.1 file from the mxf with Vegas Pro. Then I used the Snell and Wilcox mxf desktop to unwrap the native .m2v essence video. The final step was to mux the .ac3 file from Vegas with the .m2v file from S&W, and play it back on the WD TV. It plays back at the full EX1 HQ 35mbps bitrate, from both the USB key or a USB portable hard drive. Nice.

yes, i tried to extract the audio from the mxf file from premiere.
working fine, it is just an annoying step, since we already get the .aes file.
This file contain PCM uncompressed AES3 audio, so it should be easy to write a converter to wav or mp3. unfortunately i found known until yet.

I have played other .m2t and .ts files that have Dolby Digital and it works fine. I think this issue is specific to Dolby True HD which is a prominent format on Blu-ray disks. The .m2ts stream I was using has 6 audio tracks. The primary one is True HD which will not play on my PC either. However using VLC media player I can check the other 5 tracks and they are Dolby Digital, but unfortunately are all foreign language versions. The only English track is the Dolby True HD, which cannot play on the WD player.

Any reason why this wouldn't work with a USB DVD-ROM (or Blu-Ray, for that matter) computer drive?

It was reported and I have confirmed, a problem with the 1.01.02 firmware if the display resolution is set 1080p 24hz output. It is outputting 24hz instead of 23.976, causing a slight but observable jerk from the dropped frame once every 41.7 seconds. It's more noticeable if it happens during a slow pan.

Just received a WD HD TV unit yesterday. Hooked it up this morning with the new firmware ready to go at "root" level of the hardrive. Everything went swimmingly. This unit, as you the owners know, is essential if you deal with HD footage. It pretty much works out of the box as advertised. I did up a couple of test files - one as an mp2 at 25 mBit CBR, as recommended by someone here. I also did up one at 25 mBit mp4 H.264 using a ramped up gamma setting (I am on a Mac) to try and match a 2.2 gamma but I overshot it a bit. No audio problems as some have reported.

I encoded both files, one using 44.1 kHz and the other at 48 kHz. Both played fine. With the Toslink digital out I wonder if it is possible to do 96 kHz sampling rate (as that is the Toslink / SPDIF standard). Will have to dig through the instruction manual more.

Had a thorough go through the user manual, on page 71 it clearly states the video and audio resolutions the unit can handle. Some subtle but interesting things.

Here are a few..

In audio formats it WILL play PCM (yes PCM audio), some of the obvious ones like mp3, mp2 & 4AAC, all flavours of mp (1,2,3 & 4). It will play the lossless format FLAC (this is big news for some audio buffs) as there are few players that will do FLAC that have limited functionality. It plays ogg vorbis. So it pretty much plays any audio you through at it as long as the bitrate is no higher the 48 kHz. It still might pass through higher sample rated audio files through the toslink / SPDIF port. I haven't tried it yet.

In the video formats it will play what most people expect now that the basic news is out about it but there are a few small limitations that people should know about. It appears the H.264 format is the one that has the widest unqualified support. it will accept files with resolutions in that format upto 1920x1080. If your files are WMVs you have to be careful about the way you crunch it (see attachment). MP2 is accepted upto 1080i/p.

The attachment has a thorough list of acceptable formats for the unit.

So I came across this. This looks just as good if not better than the WD unit.

Multimedia Hard Drive: Multimedia Ethernet and USB PC to TV Video Hard Drive

Couple things to note. No Mac support, only goes up to 1080i and I can't determine what type of inputs it has to record to the box or whether it can record in HD.

That one is a lot more expensive, there are more mediaplayers in that price range that offer more then the WD player but non come close to the price of the WD player.

Yes, but one you buy a 1tb HD it's the same price.

you can get 1t drives for $100 these days... and nice ones too...

yes, and after that's all said and done it's almost as much as that other unit. But I have the WD unit and dont plan on ditching it.

It's not only the cheap price that's making this small device an interesting piece of hardware, I use it mainly for client visits and I use a usb stick with 720p HD demo's on it. Being able to carry such a small device with such great image quality on a full hd lcd has made my life a lot easier trying to sell my work. The fact that I don't have to carry an extra external harddrive makes a difference for me.

So true. This level of portability really changes how the WD TV will be used. My gripe with the unit is that it doesn't really turn off when you turn it off, so I unplug it.

I just made the switch from a PC to MAC and I hooked my mac formated harddrive up to my media player but and tried to play a .mov clip I edited and it's not playing, saying its not a supported file type. I have the latest firmware and everything. Any advice?