Dead quiet. Don't think it makes any sound at all. Certainly has no fan.

Yup! I just checked on this feature. In the "settings" menu, select the TV monitor icon, it then says "Normal", "Repeat One", "Repeat All". Select one of the repeats and then exit the set up menu. Go to a clip and hit play! If you said "Repeat One" it'll play that clip over and over, repeat all plays all the clips in that folder over and over! Very simple, and this has a bunch of uses for use content producers.

Thanks again Paul ordered yesterday from Amazon and it arrives today. A local store where I plan to buy my HDTV has said bring it in and lets hook it up to all the HDTV's.

It needs an SD card slot! Then you can forego the hard drive altogether!

I'm thinking a USB 2.0 card reader that reads SDHC cards at full USB 2.0 speeds would do it.

There are no moving parts...

the only noise would have to come from the hard drive you plug into the player....

I'm using it with a projector, so the fan in the projector is the noise generator

I've got a dumb question, please be patient cuz I'm new to this format. How can a card that is rated at 15mb/sec capture a 35mb/sec data stream? Are my numbers goofed up?

Are you talking about the Western Digital HD media player? It gets very hot. I picked it up once and thought I heard a fan going in there. Still, it's very quiet. I'll recheck when I get home.

It's because it's 15MB/s which means 15 megabytes per second verses 35mbps (which is 35 megabits per second. 8 bits = 1 byte, so 15MB/s = 15x8= 120mbps.

ah of course, thanks, always get those things mixed up. mb, MB, MBA, MD...

I purchased one to replace an AppleTV to review dailies. After encoding H264 it played great but could FF or Rev which is a bug that is discussed on other threads.

I have not had a chance to test this much, but it would be great if it played back ProRes clips.

That would be cool, but would probably drive costs up. You CAN use a thumbdrive though!

I tried a ProRes clip and it wouldn't play. There are some file formats that won't allow fast forward or rewinding. I forget now but one of these will and one won't: MP4 and M4V, but I forgot which!

So far I'm finding if I output my MASTER to MPG2 at 25mb CBR Program Stream the files encode faster than H264, allow Fast Forward and Rewind and look identical to the MASTER. I need to try some different encodes though because it still is taking me about 4-5 times run time of the clip to encode this way.

You can use an sd card, just get a sd>usb reader. Or an SDHC>USB reader, same as were using for the EX1 SDHC cards.

Paul.

Took the WD TV to a local HDTV store yesterday and played off a 2GB thumb drive. It would only play the Apple TV encoded footage which looked great since the footage is 720P. It would not play the .mov, H264, and MPEG4. Need to re-render and see what the problem is since the store would like to run my footage as part of their daily HDTV demo's and I want to give them 1080p.