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.