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?

Yeah, it seems as of now the only MOV formats supported are MPEG4 and H.264.

oh ok, I'll try MPEG4.

thanks

Hallo, just a quick question:
How can you update this device with your pc?You should have a USB-USB cable right?
I bought mine wd a few days ago....
What's the best hdv format to render from original footage shot from a Z1?

Copy the new firmware onto a flash drive and go to firmware update in menu, will detect the new firmware on the flash drive.

Sorry Nick, will an usb pen useful for that?

thx and sorry 4 the silly question!

Yes a USB pen will be fine for firmware updates, actually I am now using a 16gb usb stick for all my video files and it works great with apple tv H264 mpeg4 at 5mbs.

ok well I have a sony 1080i TV and when playing HD clips from the WD player it comes up as either a stretched image or theres a black border around the whole entire clip. I have an HDMI cable running from the player to the TV and the settings are on 1080i on the unit.

Any idea how to get the clip to fill up the entire screen?

scratch that, I figured it out.

Yes, I've found that the Apple TV H.264 setting is the only one that gives a good result with the WD Media player.

Although I've used Compressor to add chapter markers to the file (.m4v), the WD won't recognize them and you also can't fast forward or rewind. So basically you have to play the movie all the way through to get to the part you want to watch.

I've also tested using the preset H.264 setting in Compressor - "QuickTime H.264 video with PCM audio at 48 kHz. Settings based off the source resolution and frame-rate".

The WD player didn't recognize the PCM audio at all, but it did play the visual track.

I re-compressed with the same settings, except I changed the PCM audio to AAC, and the sound then worked. However, the player would occasionally stagger and even briefly freeze on certain pan and tilt shots. Most disappointing, but at least the WD player could fast forward and rewind with this .mov file.

The movie was 89 1/2 minutes long and the Apple TV file (.m4v) was 3.16 GB which yields an average bitrate (per my calculations) of 4.7 Mbits/sec.

The same movie with the preset H.264 setting (.mov) was 16.11 GB which yields an average bitrate of 24 Mbits/sec.

Hopefully I'll find the time to further experiment with the H.264 bitrate settings and determine the maximum bitrate limit which doesn't freeze the WD player.

I tested the Apple TV file on a large widescreen plasma using an HDMI cable and it looked very nice. I also tested the same file on the plasma using the composite RCA connectors, just to compare. And it stood up reasonably well (surprisingly so). I'm not sure if going out the composite connectors (analog) causes the WD player to automatically downconvert the signal to SD (PAL), but it still looked pretty good to my eye.

BTW, for any locals reading this post, I used a 32 GB USB stick with the WD player. They're only $89 at the local MSY store (here in Melbourne). While there, I also bought a 10 metre HDMI cable for the test. Only $20. Worked really well.

Since this player is having issues playing certain audio / video formats, what are the chances WD will be releasing another update soon?