Product Description
From the Manufacturer
Store your digital media collection, play home network media, watch movies, and access Internet favorites. Enjoy it all on your big screen TV in brilliant high-definition with the WD TV Live Hub media center, a network media player with a built-in high-capacity hard drive.
Product Description
Store your digital media collection, play home network media, watch movies, and access Internet favorites. Enjoy it all on your big screen TV in brilliant high-definition with the WD TV Live Hub media center, a network media player with a built-in high-capacity hard drive.
Technical Details
- A high capacity 1 terabyte hard drive and network HD media player in one
- Play media from USB drives, home network, and the Internet on your TV
- Beautifully simple user interface for everyone in the family to use
- Access your Netflix unlimited membership or Blockbuster On Demand and watch movies and TV episodes instantly.
- Collect your media in one place and stream it anywhere in the house.
Saturday, November 19th 2011 at 1:48 pm |
5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome!, November 14, 2011
This review is from: Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center (Electronics)
Got this as an upgrade to the WD TV Live and we’re very happy with our purchase. We use this for our own digital movie files as well as for Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Pandora. The 1TB storage is a major bonus as we have lots of music and video files. We are happy we went with this one instead of considering to go back to cable or satellite tv.
5.0 out of 5 stars Works perfect, November 12, 2011
This review is from: Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center (Electronics)
i have not put in many movies as i want but so far so good i show it to some friend and they just want it i thinks its a good product, but just don’t expect to works as the Media centers that cost thousands of dollar but i have not a complain yet.
5.0 out of 5 stars Great little Device, November 10, 2011
This review is from:Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center (Electronics)
Forget about buying a TIVO DVR!
I record my own shows thanks to an HDTV Tuner card I’d purchased at another site, and this baby let’s my family watch them on the living room TV.
It can play all kinds of video (MKV, AVI) even video that was encoded with DiVx (my card uses that codec to compress HDTV to smaller size AVI video’s).
This past year, I even tried playing DVD and later, Bluray, video’s to it’s hard drive (thru my computer) and it played them flawlessly.
Beware that you will be prompted to UPDATE it’s firmware from time to time, sometimes that adds features but mostly it’s to fix little quirks in older firmware (software that runs device). So you will have to disconnect external HD’s that you may have plugged into it to perform updates without issues (works best if using USB memory sticks).
And you’ll appreciate the external HD connections when you actually fill up the built-in 1 Terabyte Drive. After years of recording and downloading video’s, I’ve filled up it’s internal drive (1 Tb) plus an additional 1 Terabyte (My Book essential) with stuff I’ve recorded off Satellite and local HD-TV programs.
Oh, and the built in “apps” allow you to access Netflix, Accuweather, Pandora radio, Shoutcast, and about a dozen other services. (They add more with each firmware update)
In short, It’s GREAT! And so easy to use, everyone in the family can use it if they know how to hit PLAY, PAUSE, STOP or FAST FORWARD on an old VCR or DVD player.
Oh, and if you search the internet, you’ll find support groups on Western digital home site [...] and at AVS forums and B-RAD, a hack site that offers hacked firmware [...] for even more experimenting and added features that Western Digital hasn’t put on it yet.
The only DOWNSIDE – The drive that seemed SO huge in the beginning, filled up after about a year. I wish it had a BIGGER HD in it – but you know I’m being Greedy
Buy one, record all your DVD’s to it and you’ll be able to play Any DVD/video on demand.. without handling DVD’s!
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Do not buy, November 4, 2011
This review is from:Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center (Electronics)
I purchased this based on the reviews that it “just works” and that it would read iso files from DVDs.
It is difficult to transfer video to the device. Generally you have to restart it to have it recognize that you have added files. When that doesn’t work, which was most of the time for me, you have to clear the media library, which seems to be an internal cache of the files on the system.
After I figured this out and loaded a couple of movies, I got to watch about 40 minutes of a movie when it abruptly stopped. After doing some troubleshooting, I discovered that the unit could no longer see the internal hard drive. Maybe it failed, maybe it didn’t like the movie, who knows.
I talked to WD and after doing a reset, the answer was to send it back to have it looked at. I think not. After looking at the WD forums and the amount of jiggery-pokery required to coax one of these to work, I am returning it.
4.0 out of 5 stars Great streaming media box . . . ., November 3, 2011
This review is from: Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center (Electronics)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What’s this?)
Streaming media boxes are the easiest way to get internet movies off your PC and onto your big-screen TV. Roku, Boxee and the Apple TV are all in this space with Roku seeming to have the best reviews. Now Western Digital is trying to out-Roku Roku with its WD TV Live Hub. Based on my experience with this little box, I’d say Western Digital succeeded.
Setting up this small black box should take about five minutes: just connect an Ethernet cable (not included) from your router and either an HDMI cable or the included composite cables to your HD television. Now, if you don’t have the TV near your router you would think that you could use the browser-based setup instead. You’d be wrong, you have to have a monitor that has a HDMI interface which turned into a big problem for me as my router is in a wiring closet and I had my computer using the HDMI input on my monitor in an office far away. When you finally figure out a way to hard wire everything you can start setup (why doesn’t the browser based tools allow you to do basic setup?)You can use the device’s remote control and the on-screen keyboard (or attach a USB keyboard which is highly recommended if you have one) to adjust the time, date, time zone, and city. If you have a subscription with Netflix or a similar Internet service, enter your ID and password. Finally you’re done. Unhook everything and move the box next to your HD TV, hook it back up to your internal internet and now you can use your browser to access the device and make changes.
Like the Roku, the Live Hub streams media from lots of Internet channels such as Netflix, AccuWeather, Hulu Plus, and Pandora. Live Hub can also access content from either its 1TB hard drive or any computer or hard drive in your network. The Hub’s main screen organizes your content into Services, Videos, Music, Photos, and Files tabs. Small boxes at the top of the screen display the time and local weather.
The WD Discovery PC app lets you easily transfer files between its internal hard drive and other PCs and external disks in your network. The Hub supports nearly all file formats for video and audio playback. Photo formats are limited to the more common types: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and PNG. Videos are displayed in razor-sharp, 1080p HD (on TVs that support that output). I have a number of movies ripped to my home server and I can move them to the drive and have them instantly accessible.
It’s quiet, it works well once you get past the setup requirements, and WD support actually answers the phone or responds to your email inquiries as I tested that also. One star off for the setup, four stars for everything else.