Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player Review

Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player is a very useful tool for improving ease of access to the steadily building store of digital media held by individuals and families. The WD TV HD Media Payer can be used to play HD (up to 1080p) video and digital music as well as show high-resolution slideshows of your family photos on a large screen HDTV. It mirrors and exceeds the digital media playback capabilities available with some premium HDTVs.

Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

Western Digital has optimized the WD TV Media Player for use with its My Passport portable drive (sold separately) but will work with any USB based storage device as well as digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices. The unit can even access two USB drives simultaneously. The Media Library feature conveniently aggregates the content on connected storage devices and presents them as a list sorted by media type. A remote control is included to navigate the simple to use animated HD menus.

The WD TV Media Player comes with both HDMI and composite video connections providing compatibility with most televisions. Although the range of digital media formats the player will recognize is market leading, Western Digital also include a free media conversion software package, ArcSoft MediaConverter 2.5, for conversion of photo, video, and music files into formats optimized for use on the WD TV HD Media Player. Importantly, owners are also able to update the players software by downloading updates from the Web to a USB drive and plugging it into the device.

Key Features of WD TV Media Player

Advanced navigation

Thumbnail and list views – Browse your content by filename or by thumbnails of photos, album covers and movie cover art.
Media Library – This unique feature lets you view all your media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives. You can view your content by categories such as genre, album, artist and date.
Search – Search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename.

Photo viewing

Create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music
Zoom and pan
Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date

Movie viewing