We have all these high definition projects still archived and only ONE has been distributed on Blu-ray disc. Yeah, that format “won” the HD wars, but its probably soon to be dead. There’s several articles online about this… long story short, the price of the players are still high and the blank discs are high… with upconverting DVD players displaying near HD quality on the cheap, why bother? I think that is most of the problem…
Enter the new and quietly released Western Digital TV HD Media Player for USB Devices Item code: WDAVN00BN (Its still not on WD site, but that’s a direct link to Best Buy’s site.) EDIT: Now it is on Western Digital’s site. It is currently on sale for a mere $99 at Best Buy! A friend of mine told me posted this on a forum I belong to and for $99, I figured I would try it out… all I can say is WOWZERS! I am highly impressed with this little device!
The reason for this post is simple… to introduce this and to provide a hands on review. I feel there are some great uses for this device:
- Same Day Edits – oh yeah! Shoot it, edit it, show it directly from the USB hard drive! No burning to discs or printing back to tape and playing back from camera…
- Tradeshows – another oh yeah! Instead of packing up a blu-ray player and everything, just take a HDTV, this tiny unit and its hard drive and it will loop beautiful 1080p video all day long.
- DISTRIBUTION TO CLIENTS – I’ve been on a search for a viable cost effective method for distributing HD to our clients since we’ve been shooting HD! REALLY, for right at $200 (USB Hard Drive and this unit). The main difference in this and other methods (including Blu-ray) is this… you can play MANY types of media on this device including photos! So, you could get all your wedding video “chapters” in the Video folder, the photographer could essentially either give or sell you all your wedding photos and you can copy them to a Pictures folder (you could setup a slideshow on this unit to show your photos on your HDTV) and yes, you can even play music on it! All from a USB hard drive.
OK, enough with these ideas, let’s get into the unit!
What does it look like? (Click Images to enlarge!)
Small. In this photo, you’ll see it sitting next to a small Canon HV30 camcorder and a regular WD My Book External USB drive… I told you its small!
Click image to view full size.
Note the connectors… There are 2 USB ports. Yes, you can even play media off of a USB Thumbdrive! Be sure to press “Eject” on the remote when you want to disconnect the drive……..
Operations, menus and screen grabs…
This unit is very easy to operate… Turn it on, go to settings and set everything like HDMI output size and such… it has NTSC and PAL (50 hz and 60 hz) Mouse over image for description and click for full size pic)
Like I said, it is very easy to operate this. I wish you could build custom menus like a DVD or Blu-ray disc, but you can’t. When I loaded the sample HD media on the WD CD-Rom, there were thumbnails of each video instead of the default disc icons you see in the 3rd pic… I want to figure out how to make a thumbnail show up. There wasn’t any jpgs or anything, somehow in the MP4 sample files, it knew of a thumbnail…. hrm.
Anyways, the specs show the following file formats that it will play… note that M2T is not mentioned, but that was the first file I tried when loading my own videos… it played it just fine (perhaps because it is a MPG2 video???) So you can dump native HDV M2T files on a HD and play them instantly… no conversions!
This doesn’t allow chapter skipping or the like, but has a relatively fast 16x forward search. It reminds me of VCR days, but faster. You can update firmware (although this unit is NOT currently listed on Western Digital suppoer site) so I would think that they could add a “skip forward 5 minutes” or something like that in a firmware update… who knows.
So, this is a short and sweet review. I highly recommend this product to anyone wanting to playback HD content easilly on your HDTV. Without a standard delivery method (even though Blu-ray “won” the HD Disc wars) I feel this is a viable candidate WITH BENEFITS… Think about it. You can use endless hard drives for your content, convert existing DVDs with proper software to playback via the hard drive, playback photo slideshows (you can put different folders on the drive and navigate and play folders so you could have “wedding”, “birthday”, holidays” etc or play all of them! You can also playback downloaded Quicktime MOV files, Windows Media WMV files and such so download web content and watch on your HDTV with this unit… I can’t confirm if there is an upscaler/upconverter, but it does appear to do a good job at upscaling. For instance, I put a 480p WMV clip and a 480p MP4 clip and played it back and it looked really good! Better than any standard definition cable channels being played on my other HDTV.
There is software that comes bundled with it to be used for converting media… frankly, it is aweful. I don’t need it because I can encode everything I need with Sony Vegas Pro… Why they packaged an inferior converter is beyond me… I could only get it to configure for 480i resolution… NO WHERE NEAR HD! Like I said, I don’t need it…….
Yes, you can do h.264, but from what I am seeing so far… why not just encode back to HDV and dump that to hard drive and playback? Disc space is not a concern really, and it plays it back beautifully PLUS M2T files are faster to encode!
So, go buy one if you can find one (I got mine from Best Buy in the link above) and enjoy the beauty of HD at a relatively low cost! For all of our JC/DV clients who has not received your Blu-ray copy yet because you don’t have a Blu-ray player yet… contact us if you would like to pursue this option! I wouldn’t spend the time to write up this review if I didn’t believe in this product…….
Have a great day!
Nice one Jerome, I agree that the whole BluRay thing seems to have an incredibly slow uptake due to high prices and the problems faced by us producers with authoring these disks.
We’ve had more interest from people to actually deliver on Hard Drive than on BD or HD-DVD.
Unless these prices come down dramatically, especially during an economic downturn there doesn’t seem to be a lot of hope for this new optical media in the short term.
Evro, I have to ask a stupid question… how do you get your own avatar to show up on a reply?
EDIT, NEVERMIND… http://www.gravatar.com!
Interesting entry Jerome, thanks!
Hi Jerome,
Great find. This may be a good solution. Thanks for brining it to our attention.
All My Best,
Mark Von Lanken
http://www.VonWeddingFilms.com
Jerome
I thing shoud be a TV and play all the formats HD Video, Blue Ray, VHS, SVHS, DVD’s, Media cards, usb key’s ……etc, etc.
I still have some clients requesting VHS tapes.
Arber
Hey Jerome, interesting technology. I remember the Avel player or something that was kind of similar, but this is modular enough to allow you to connect any usb drive now or in the future. Seems like good stuff.
Now that is an awesome find!!!
Great post Jerome! Thanks!
Nice job! You didn’t waste any time getting to that Best Buy did you. A very quick turn-around on the review of this little puppy.
You should be seeing a spike in traffic to your site because this blog post is currently the most information available on this thing so far. Western Digital must be getting so swamped with orders it hasn’t bothered to put up anything on it’s own website about this device yet.
As I mentioned to you yesterday, I ordered one, and Best Buy notified me today that it has shipped. I’m guessing this is going to make it onto lots of folks holiday wish lists. Can hardly wait to get mine and start tinkering with it. Thanks for the informative review!
Michael
Thanks guys! Michael, thanks for telling me about this at WVP! I ended up putting a link to your site at “A friend of mine”…
BTW, a quick search on the model number and review on google has this entry on the second page of results ALREADY!
Great review Jerome, I only hope the price in Europe stays reasonable because this thing might have a big impact on the way I was planning to sell HD packages to my clients.
Thanks for sharing.
To echo everyone else. This is a great find and a cool little device. Something like this will be the future of content delivery. Just need to find a way to protect the wedding video upon delivery so that it can’t accidentally be deleted.
Brian, that may not work… protecting the files from being deleted. They’ll just need to keep a backup. I have everything archived even in case their DVD from years ago quits working, so same thing here I guess.
That is the only thing I worry about. I am a tech geek and until recently when we lost a HD in my wife’s computer, we were not doing backups of our data. Now we do it nightly.
I guess to is a matter of putting something in our agreement to states we are not responsible if they delete the files. But keep a backup and be a hero down the road if necessary.
Yeah, since I’m on a RAID 0 setup for all the capture/working drive, I do backups after EVERY time I edit so I don’t loose anything. Furthermore, I also backup my archive drives of all the DVDs I’ve ever produced…. knock on wood, its working so far. Thinking about tape backup too for all the archived finished projects.
Thanks for the review. Shame it doesn’t have component out…..
Hey Mark, doesn’t your HDTV have HDMI?
What settings in Vegas are you using to encode to the thumbdrives?
So far, the only thing I played from a thumbdrive are 1080p trailers downloaded at apple.com. I’ll see if an M2T will play off one later….
Mark, it plays a 1080 MT2 right off the thumbdrive fine!
Hey Jerome, Been playing with it. Excellent unit. Using a small 16gb SDHC Sandisk card with a small usb converter it can play m2t files - no problem!
Sweet! I was about to try that… no need to do so now. Thanks!
I just wonder does it support rmvb files? or real Player’s file? Thanks!
Post one online somewhere and give me the URL and I’ll test it out for you.
All my RMVB files are kinda large in size, so I found a link that has a smaller file for you to test with, I’ve downloaded the video and also played it on my pc, it’s safe, no virus or anything.
I hope it works and I really appreciate your help, cuz I’m going to buy it tomorrow if it works, Thanks.
http://downloads.gamezone.com/demos/d8418.htm
just choose the RMVB format link, it’s a trailer of a Hulk game.
Does it play .iso format files like the one from klegg?
I read on another site that it does not play .iso files.
Hi,did my post went throght? if you tested please let me know, Thx
I found a link that has a smaller file for you to test with, I’ve downloaded the video and also played it on my pc, so it’s safe.
I hope it works and I really appreciate your help,Thanks.
http://downloads.gamezone.com/demos/d8418.htm
just choose the RMVB format link, it’s a trailer of a Hulk game.
Sorry, it was in Askimet Spam folder… I “unspammed” the links…. checking out files now.
It does not play back that Real Media file… why even bother with Real Media??? I can’t remember the last time I even downloaded a Real Media file…
Jerome: Have u had any luck with trying to get a SATA to USB adapter to work with a 3.5″ hard drive without using the WD products? I do not have a WD My Book or anything to see what the difference is in that and a SATA to USB adapter. Do you happen to have one? Or a SATA to USB adapter to test out? I cant seem to get mine to work…
Thanks!
Hey David, I don’t have a SATA to USB adapter, however I strongly feel that it would work (unless it requires a driver on a computer.) Lou did a test with a SD card in a USB adapter and it played HDV from a SD card…. So I would assume that anything with a USB connector without a driver would work fine.
jc,
Thank You! Looks like an efficient, portable alternative to BluRay delivery.
Great review - thanks.
I read (on the best buy website) that someone had put a NAS USB drive on there and was able to copy files to the drive over the network and they showed up automatically on the WD.
I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this setup?
Also - is there a Flashcard based NAS? e.g… a NAS with usb and ethernet (obviously) and a slot for SD cards or something… that way I can have a completely solid state network device for dropping media into and then a beautiful HD output device…
am I crazy?? probably
Hey JC..Can you hook one usb port to a computer & other port to a ext. hard drive so that why I could “drag” a file thourgh the network to the ext hard drive & play it on the HDTV!Would the computer even see the ext hard drive hooked to it? lol Or is there a better way to do this? Very interesting unit!!!Let me know please..
Interesting idea…. let me do some playing around with that concept tomorrow.
Hey Jerome
saw your post and ordered one- then I thought- heck - I have yet to upgrade to HD- can I play my avi ( SD) files on this puppy?? I want to assume yes- ( but you know what assuming can do!)
I actually have been selling my clients their external hard drives now for 2 years- in anticipation of something JUST LIKE THIS…
so tell me “yes” you can play your SD footage too!
Sheila!
Hi Sheila! Yes, it will play SD footage too (though not as crisp and clear as HD)… when you upgrading to HD?
Thanks for sharing the info Jerome. I see the WD is available here in the UK now too. Last month I bought a Verbatim MediaStation Pro which has 500gb internal and does a similar job. I thought I was at the cutting edge of technology! That didn’t last long, the WD looks even better and is half the price. Saves all that messing around with Blu-Ray player issues.
Hey Jerome!
I just found this post of yours. Thank you for making us all aware of this. I love it, and I have been wondering myself what’s going to be our studio’s solution to delivering HD. Thanks again!