WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

The Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN is essentially an HTPC in a box that has been designed solely for media playback with wireless networking capabilities along with an HDMI out and a remote control. The best part about this solution is that it works as an Internet TV solution in addition to streaming all your digital content from multiple sources. Downside is that it is not meant for connecting your other HD devices wireless to your HDTV.

The WD TV Live line from Western Digital has been receiving a lot of love from its users for being a very elegant solution to our craving for digital playback through our TV screens. By now, we all have a burgeoning collection of digital media — be it our subscriptions on YouTube, Pandora or local media files. Its biggest strength has to be the fact that it has two USB ports with support for a wide variety of devices and can access both simultaneously, allowing copy/delete/move functions in and between both drives. It support most USB storage devices as well as cameras and camcorders. Another major advantage is its support for a wide variety of codecs, including non-standard ones like the mkv (Matroska) codec. This will make most Internet geeks quite happy.

Even though it has wireless connectivity, it is finicky about support. However, from the description it seems like most of the newer routers will be supported. Especially if it has 802.11n support because the problem seems to be related older wireless standards. Once major problem is that it is only meant for Windows and not Mac. However, that doesn’t matter if you are using NAS (Network Attached Storage).

Internet streaming is pretty smooth for most users with built in support for YouTube, Pandora, Flickr and Live365. There’s support for a wide variety of music and image files too. The user interface is friendly, simplified and should be familiar grounds for users of similar products. With a price tag of $95, the Western Digital WD TV Live Network-Ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN is a good buy for almost every Windows using new media enthusiast.