**They need to get fast forward, reverse and play buttons to work**. Make sorting characteristics last.
They need to deal with basic issues, easily connect to OS that are only a couple years old. Upgrading OS and all software every two years is not in my pocketbook.
Can play EyeTV files. If you make an edit in EyeTV, the HUB will freeze the image at the point but keeps counting the time through the edit to the end point. Work around is to export the EyeTV file on your computer. I export to Toast as an MPEG and send that file to the HUB.
Had trouble originally connecting to my Mac OS 10.4.11 but now works with most up to date firmware.
Have not yet been able to connect to the public folder on my Mac to access files, even though I can move files to and from on my Mac. The basic interface window always go to the same place, not adjustable or to where you were last. You can change the sort order of various lists, but only temporarily. If you go elsewhere and come back, you are in the default sort order again.... how silly! They need to get the interface to work in a transparent fashion that users expect.
|
|
WORTH EVERY PENNY!!!
troublesome product since first bought such as suddenly stop to playback or does not turn on although its power is on did everything suggested by Singapore personnels including resetting but nothing improved but only got worse and need resetting more frequently, finally mailed a few times to ask for money back or trade in for other models but no response from Singapore office since, I can verified this is true with all of corresponding mails, my review is intended to warn those who plan to buy it to think twice due to the product defects as well as after-sale service or may be because we're in Thailand where WD may not care so much as in the US
A great product for any home, especially if you are into HD video editing. All of my HD golf videos that I've edited are much more enjoyable to watch on my 50" TV, and can be stored on the 1 TB hard drive, to be transferred back and forth from PC to Media Hub and vice-versa. Maybe a little over-priced at $199.99, but I'm sure the price will fall. But for my money, it's one of the best tech products I've invested in over the past few years!
I believe you will enjoy this media player but only if you take the preventive measures previously noted. If you do not, you will be sending this device back to WD.
I quote from the review: "built-in 1TB hard drive will appeal to advanced users who have a lot of existing files"
Well... no. I'm certainly an advanced user, but I already have 4Tb of digitized films and I'm still transferring films from my VHS & DVD collections to digital formats on a weekly basis. That "spacious" 1Tb drive is wasted on me, as my main media server (w/ attached 4Tb NAS) already has over 7Tb of disk space available.
That said, it is still a sweet piece of equipment for getting my collection of films and music on the 46" TV, as well as offering another method for streaming content throughout my rather large network of computers and TVs.
I have one now and I've ordered another one for Xmas, so you can tell I give real props to the device. It does what it says it does with some style, but mostly... it just works.
Worth the money in every aspect!
The WD Live Hub, covers more than my needs.
A lot of people are nagging over the lack of onboard Wi-Fi, but they forget that 1080p is tough on Wi-Fi.
The network drive is a great touch. I live in a mixed environment with Windows and Mac OS X and the ability to move or stream data from both systems is great. No worries if I should format the drive in NTFS or HFS+, everything worked out of the box.
It can also double as a backup device.
I did own an older WD Media Player that was suffering to playback the 1080p, this one has no problem. The drive is practically noiseless in a living room environment, and the minimal design of the device promises to fit anywhere aesthetically.
The subtitles are working great at least in Greek ( not as easy as it sounds, Greek encoding is still kind of a mess, and it handles it very well).
I believe, I choose very well and I would recommend the WD Live Hub to anybody.
My other alternative was the Apple TV, but the lack of almost all online services in Greece along with the non existing Apple Movie store yet in the country and the inability of storage (the old one had it,but they removed it now) kept me away, not to mention the far less formats it supports than the WD Live Hub.
I cannot say anything about the WD digital support like other people do (they say it is useless), cause, thanks to the built quality and the intuitive interface of all WD products I own, never needed it.
I do enjoy WDTV and have had their original model for some time but recently purchased the new WDTV live HUB. As stated earlier I love the content info AKA metadata feature, but the fact that they have made it so delicate to where any slight thing will scramble the metadata and then you have to spend hours re-downloading all of it again is very frustrating. Western digital needs to get a firmware update for this issue because it is the one major drawback where other brand media players don't have this issue with their metadata option. If you make the metadata feature that touchy and prone to these issues then either it needs to be fixed or not offered period because the meta data has been erased on me now 3 different times. I called Western Digital and they said if its plugged into a surge protector then the metadata will scramble if even there is any slight increase/decrease in voltage in surge protector. This to me is flat out dumb if you can't keep your device safer by plugging it into a surge protector. So instead they tell me I have to plug it into wall where it is left vulnerable to power surges if I want to ensure the metadata doesn't get scrambled. I also figured out that if you rename any of the folders in your folder structure for movies it will scramble metadata. If you want to rename any folders then be sure to do it before you begin downloading metadata for your movies not after. Once again these to me are what keep the WDTV live hub from being a truly perfect device. They need to get the metadata issue fixed with a firmware update ASAP or they will continue to frustrate customers who purchased the device.
I hooked up the WD TV Live Hub to my network and copied my photo files to it using Windows Explorer. This was slow, but did work. On the WD TV Live Hub, it's supposed to compile a Media Library which contains information about the files that are on the internal hard drive. The Media Library ended up with information for only about 10,000 of the 16,000 files I copied over. This resulted in me not being able to access files with missing Media Library information through the user interface.
I next choose to set up an automated sync between my WD My Book World Edition and the WD TV Live Hub. This is a feature of the WD TV Live Hub. I thought that if the WD TV Live Hub was managing the syncing of files, then the Media Library would be kept up to date. However, after the sync process was done, the Media Library was missing information for the same files as my earlier setup. Interesting, in both scenarios, the same information was missing from the Media Library.
The WD TV Live Hub also has a Media Library rebuild option. I tried this also. Rebuilding the Media Library still resulted in the same files missing from the Media Library.
I have come to the conclusion that the WD TV Live Hub is not ready as a consumer product yet. It's just too buggy. I cannot recommend this product for purchase by anyone at this time. If I still had the box it came in, I would box it up and return it to Best Buy. At this point, I can only hope that a future firmware update corrects the problems that I'm having with it.
I bought this so I can watch my Home and Away episodes through the TV with this when I go away on holidays without having all this drama since it has an inbuilt hard drive so I don't need to worry about an external one.