Western Digital's
WD TV HD Media Player kept a low profile before hitting shelves this month, but with only $99 separating MaddHat.com from a thorough teardown, the inevitable next step was taken. Besides snapshots inside and out -- and the ubiquitous iPhone size comparison photo -- a quick runthrough with a variety of MKV-packed videos revealed delightfully nerdy results. The 1080p h.264 decoding was smooth, although some odd sharpening on 720p files while in 1080p output mode, and less than optimal results with 1080i-encoded files were noted. 1080p24 support didn't make it into the box, same for .ISO direct support -- no worries though, as it wasn't enough to stop the .m2ts files in the Blu-ray backups from playing directly. Good for the price, but with stiff competition --
Popcorn Hour anyone? -- being "good enough" in this sector is getting harder, pics and details are beyond the read link.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jason Anderson @ Nov 22nd 2008 3:51AM
So what can this do that my Xbox 360 with Mac mini and Rivet Media Center is doing right now?
TLoganK @ Nov 4th 2008 2:31PM
I'm really thinking about getting this.
plushog @ Nov 4th 2008 3:06PM
Curious if you can use a terastation with this.
casey chesnut @ Nov 4th 2008 3:38PM
i'd only be interested in this if i could plug an ethernet-to-usb connection in to access files on the network.
WDTV_owner @ Nov 13th 2008 12:17PM
no VC-1 playback