Western Digital HD Media Player
Posted in Electronics on 24 May 2009 at 12:39 pm
I know that people are usually looking for a media player to play their shows on and something that plays different kinds of media and something simple. Other then building your own media PC this is the best and simplest player I have seen around, 1080p without a hitch, doesn’t matter if its an External HD which is Mac formatted or PC formatted but this is your best bet and very simple to operate. Just attached the external drive with all the shows and movie, choose what you want and enjoy.
- 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 content by categories such as genre, album, artist and date. / Search – Search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename
- Create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music
- Movie viewing – Fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan; View subtitles – Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date
- Music – Fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat; Supported USB Device file systems: FAT-32, NTFS, HFS+ (no journaling)
File Formats Supported
- Music – MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
- Graphics – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
- Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)
- Playlist – PLS, M3U, WPL Subtitle -SRT (UTF-8)
Note:
- MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9 supports up to 1920×1080p 24fps, 1920×1080i 30fps, 1280×720p 60fps resolution.
- An audio receiver is required for surround sound output.
- AAC/Dolby Digital decodes in 2 channel output only.
- JPEG does not support CMYK or lossless.
- BMP supports uncompressed format only.
- TIF/TIFF supports single layer only.
Price: $110
Link: Amazon
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May 24th 2009 at 1:41 pm
I have popcorn hour media player. http://www.popcornhour.com
Its the best player out there. but it has a small drawback, it does not support Arabic subtitle !
Do you know if this Player support Arabic Subtitle ?
May 24th 2009 at 2:24 pm
Hey…I bought this ages ago. Its everything you described and it really added another dimension to the diwaniya cinema…
You can get at Carrefour for roughly the same price (35 KD if I’m not mistaken) and no waiting…and no American adapter or what have you. I bought the WD 1 TB harddrive too and the combination is phenomenal…(plays .mkv so HD torrents shouldn’t be an issue…suggestion: True Blood HD torrents)
May 24th 2009 at 2:49 pm
i want this product but don’t know why i didn’t buy it already! “
May 24th 2009 at 3:27 pm
U can get it from Xcite at Baitak tower, and it’s pretty tiny
May 24th 2009 at 3:47 pm
just one note, if the drive is formated as Mac OS Extended Journaled the WD wont read it.
May 24th 2009 at 4:35 pm
i bought it 2 months ago from al-ghanim electronics in fhaiheel, it about 32 KD which is very good deal…. so far its amazing
May 24th 2009 at 9:56 pm
I have that. It’s badass and very simple. =O
May 24th 2009 at 10:50 pm
Well.. I’d say the popcorn hour is the ultimate multimedia player.. Plays over the network.. Play HD movies all the way upto 1080p n has a digital audio out giving u beautiful DTS or DD sound..
Nothing beats that coupled with a THX Onkyp HT n 42 inch LCD
May 25th 2009 at 1:11 am
Marzouq .. Again? :p “7a6ait eedik 3ala el jar7″ hehe ma ra7 en’7ale9 :p ok ok let’s talk :p ok I was thinking of media player for all the movies and series that i download from the internet HD or not.. I had a look on this one and it feels and looks great at first BUT when I read comments and reviews many drawbacks comes with this .. the biggest is that It Lags ALOT! and it reboot while watching a movie or series episode! this had me to look elsewhere .. so I looked further and FOUND IT! the killer media player
“HDX 1000″
Specification Overview:-
CASE
Solid Aluminium Alloy Case
SDHC and MMC Card Reader
Hardware Power ON/OFF Switch
Compatible with 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA HDD
Support Vertical or horizontal placement
CPU
Sigma Designs SMP8635 Rev. C
Memory
DDR DRAM : 64-bit 512Mb
External NOR Flash : 16-bit 256Mbit
Audio/Video outputs
Gold plated HDMI v1.3a (up to 1080p)
Gold plated Component Video (up to 1080p)
Gold plated Composite Video
Gold plated Stereo Analog Audio
Gold plated S/PDIF Coaxial Digital Audio
Optical Digital Audio
Hardware Connectivity
2x USB 2.0 host
1x USB 2.0 Slave
Serial ATA (SATA)
Ethernet 10/100
Dimension and Weight:
20 x 20 x 5.5cm / 1.5kg
Shipping Weight / 2kg
Package Content:
1 x HDX 1000 Player
1 x HDMI Cable
1 x Remote control with batteries
1 x 110~240 power supply
1 x User Guide
Streaming Connectivity
Bonjour
UPnP SSDP
DLNA
Windows Media Connect
Windows Media Player NSS
SMB
NFS
HTTP servers: myiHome, WizD, SwissCenter, MSP Portal, Llink, GB-PVR
BitTorrent P2P
NAS access : SMB, NFS, FTP
Web services
Video : YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, VideoCast, DL.TV, Cranky Geeks
Audio : iPodcast, Radiobox, ABC News
Photo : Flickr, Picasa
RSS feed : Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Traffic alerts, Yahoo! Stock, Cinecast, Traffic Conditions.
Internet Radio : Shoutcast
Media files supported
Video containers:
MPEG1/2/4 Elementary (M1V, M2V, M4V)
MPEG1/2 PS (M2P, MPG)
MPEG2 Transport Stream (TS, TP, TRP, M2T, M2TS, MTS)
VOB
AVI, ASF, WMV
Matroska (MKV)
MOV (H.264), MP4, RMP4
Video codecs:
XVID SD/HD
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MP@HL
MPEG-4.2
ASP@L5, 720p, 1-point GMC
WMV9
MP@HL
H.264
BP@L3
MP@L4.0
Audio containers:
AAC, M4A
MPEG audio (MP1, MP2, MP3, MPA)
WAV
WMA
Audio codecs:
WMA, WMA Pro
AAC
MP1, MP2, MP3
LPCM 5.1/7.1
FLAC
DTS, AC3 (supported via pass through to decoder)
Picture formats :
JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
DVD RIP Format:
ISO, IFO
Subtitle formats :
SRT, SMI, SUB, SSA
Subtitle Language:
english,gb,big5,german,greek,hebrew,russian,dutch,french,italian,czech,swedish,spanish,polish,
portuguese,bulgarian,norwegian,hungarian,slovenian,japanese,nimen
THIS IS THE ULTIMATE MEDIA PLAYER! no glitches, no stupid stuff (lacking format .. mkv, blah blah kind of stuff) so it will play EVERYTHING you throw at!
May 25th 2009 at 1:14 am
yeah and it plays all new audio formats (DTS-HD, DOLBY TRUE HD, PLUS, and so on)
May 25th 2009 at 4:07 am
Excuse my ignorance,
I hook that up to a tv and watch/listen to whatever is in there?
May 25th 2009 at 9:15 am
Popcorn hour is so much more expensive then this unit.
You can’t really compare them.
May 25th 2009 at 11:00 am
I’ve got the popcorn hour too, it is the ultimate budget media player, but it will run you a little bit more than this WD, the popcorn hour A110 is around $250(hard disk is extra). but the good thing is that the firmware is constantly updated and all of the widely used formats are supported. it also supports some basic plugins and wares. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, the only drawbacks though are the lack of arabic subtitles and the thumbnails view need some fiddling and tweaking to be turned on
for more info
http://www.networkmediatank.com
May 25th 2009 at 11:02 am
Hmmmm I really need to get one
May 25th 2009 at 3:40 pm
AQ: I’d second that… Its a litle more expensive but its definitely work the money… If you have your home network you wont even need the additional hard drive.. play the files off the network.. I have the A-100 costed me KD 60 with shipping..
I didnt know bout the Arabic subtitles.. i always thought PCH was flawless
May 26th 2009 at 7:39 am
does it support a 5.1 sound? DTS? i read on the box it’s only 2 channel support!
can anyone confirm
May 27th 2009 at 2:26 am
@vampire
If are talking about it WD MEDIA then yes it does support 5.1 Dolby Digital .. No latest surround sound (dolby-HD, DTS-HD MASTER)
May 27th 2009 at 4:38 am
it cost 30,990 K.D
Carrefour Avenues
June 27th 2009 at 12:52 pm
I have just bought a WD Media player; connected to the TV using HDMI cable and the sound to my home theatre with an optical cable. The DVD ripped movies work fine; however the BluRay ripped movies (5.1) doesn’t have any sound! The setting on the WD for sound is set as digital. Somebody please help.
July 9th 2009 at 9:54 pm
It’s true this is a very good player for the money though it does have buggy issues as many have reported. Too bad western digital has not released a firmware version yet to fix these problems. once they do this will be a hard to beat player since it can do ALMOST everything you would want it to do. Seems there are two types now: with and w/o hard drive. those with HDD like the Mediagate or Popcorn hour are a good choice. those w/o hard drives like the WD TV, IOMEGA Screenplay are good too but you have to attach some sort of external usb storage anyway. So choose wisely. If you are looking for something that may be better than the WD TV, search for this: “Mediagate MG-M2TV”. this is the newest player from Mediagate which can do everything the WD TV can but actually supports more formats like RMVB (real video) for many Asian videos. so this is one item i’m really looking forward to. hoping the reviews are good on this one.
July 11th 2009 at 2:03 am
@ Naveed
Dude the best way is to actually convert the audio file to an ac3 format and then remux the file. This will not affect your video quality at all and will keep the original resolution, it’ll only downgrade the audio into a format you can hear, im doing the same.
July 16th 2009 at 6:41 pm
I’ve had the same issue with Audio not working on MKV files???
what do we use to convert the audio so we can hear it
Video plays crisp…
January 12th 2010 at 7:14 am
Try the firmware update. its on http://www.wdc.com/en/products/wdtv/.
Seem to have a problem playing the big 1080 files though. Got a transformer rip that is 12 gigs and there is a pixel drag !