Standalone Media Player hard drives

[brianpowers27]

I just found the following stand alone hard-disk media player and I am impressed. http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WD-Media-Player/dp/B001JZFQU4/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_1 - Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

The device says it will play the normal audio formats and will also play ogg vorbis and flac files.



Has anyone used this device?

[philiparcario]

looks like it has promise. I saw something a while back for 400 with a 750gb drive built in maybe it was from the land down under>

[WWWJD]

While my brother was up for the holidays, we went to Best Buy and picked one of these up, and I must say, they are worth every penny. We paired it with a 1.5TB hard disk. The GUI is very user friendly, easy setup, and the best part is 1080P out over HDMI. I run a Mac, he runs Vista. FAT32, NTFS, and HFS all paired up flawlessly.

We spent the better part of 3 days crunching files down with Toast, Nero, Quicktime, and Slysoft. All formats displayed beautifully, and the pass through settings on the audio kept the 5.1 alive. We were watching on my 47" Vizio at 1080P from about 8 feet, and these files were pretty much flawless.

For media server's sake, we had the best luck with .iso files; the WDTV will play them straight off the disk with no problems, and compression is kept to a minimum. A 2 hour film was compressing down to around 2.5G depending on bitrate. Bit rates that we seemed to like best were between 2 and 3 kbps. Anything less, and pixelation became an issue due to compression; anything over 3 was a wasted of HD space.

IMO, it's money well spent. I don't remember where, but we found one online for $100. It's worth a look through a goggle search.

Our biggest hit for a test movie was WALL-E; any defects in the video stream are brutally evident in the darker scenes. Now.... my brother, took this gem home with him. (his money, but "dayum.. it's Christmas bro!" didn't work.) I have other priorities right now with the speaker build and the receiver showing up tomorrow, but this is on my "must have soon" list.