Customer Ratings & Reviews

I have used a previous version in the past and with the new UI in this hardware release and more online services this product is great. They also added Wifi to this version but have not tested it. It plays most video formats MKV, AVI, WMV etc as well as Netflix, Blockbuster, Youtube etc. I use it with Playon, Dlink NAS and Win 7 machines and it works great. I also have used it in my VAN on long trips with a USB harddrive and it is compact enough to use in a van. 1080p , 720p, and other files stream fine.

I've had a great experience with this box so far. It plays all of my media wonderfully and the services like youtube and pandora play great as well. My only gripes with this machine is that sometimes it will not read my media, and I will then have to unplug the unit for about 10 seconds and then it seems to work. Also, sometimes I will get a "fatal error" message and the box restarts automatically and then will work fine. This only happens a couple times a week, but its annoying to say the least. Definitely buy this product if you have a lot of media on hard drives or your computer that you want to play on the big screen. You won't be disappointed.

The user interface is very polished, user friendly, and configurable. There are already several different themes you can choose from, but I really like the default theme it comes with. Plus most of the UI is easy to see and read everything, unlike some other media players. Its similar to the WD TV Live Hub, only this one is using a newer chipset and runs at a faster mhz. I haven't owned it very long but so far it has played my 1080p 35Mbps Lord Of The Rings Extended Edition ISO & MKV files great with no stuttering from the drive that is attached to the USB port (or networked, not wireless though). My router is an Asus RT-N56U. Its movie scraping (for thumbnails) currently doesn't support networked drives, but WD posted on their forum that they had it working in their current testing firmware. But the movie thumbnails/covers do work for drives attached directly to the USB, and it looks great. I also like the remote, I can aim it any direction and still control the media player. The button layout is good also in my opinion. There is even a dedicated home button to take you directly back to the main screen. If you want to shut down the player to sleep mode, press the power button once, and if you want to shut the media player all the way down, hold the button for 3 seconds.

My motivation to buy this was to stream tv from my primary home to my vacation home. The slingbox is in the sf Bay Area and the wd TV is in the Southern California desert. Both homes have cable Internet. I used powerline adapters to get Internet to the primary home tv and have an old linksys wifi in secondary home. The system works fine. No hassles hooking it up. The quality of the signal is good. The only downside is that every time you send a command to the dvr such as change channel, fast forward, etc, there is a several second delay. Overall, I am happy with this arrangement. It saves the cost of an expensive cable and dvr package in my vacation home.

For a while I have been using my MacMini as a home theater PC. However that means I had no real computer for personal use anymore except this slapped together 3.0GHz P4 that always got so hot and the power supply was held in by duct tape. I got a $100.00 gift card and was thinking of getting another computer, maybe something with the Atom processor, to replace the MacMini but as I started to do more research I found these media players. I spent a few days reading reviews and comparing the Roku, Apple TV, and the WD Live. Apple TV was out right away because it didn't play all the formats. I started to read more reviews of the Roku and more people were saying that it had trouble playing 1080P video over the network. So I decided on the WD Live. I did the buy online and pick it up in the store and was in and out in 10 minutes. I got home, took the dog for a walk and got him fed. Then it was time to set this up. It took only about 10 minutes from opening up the box to browsing the selection of videos on my network attached storage. It had no problem playing the 1080P MKV files on my network drive. I did run into an issue where a MP4 file was not the correct format and then when I went back to play other MKV files, including the one I was just watching, I got that error on all video files. This required a reset. But that was before I did the firmware update. Another caveat when browsing network shares. It will show the entire share, create thumbnails of all contents of all folders, and are browsable. So if you have some embarassing photos of yourself when you were a kid those will be displayed.

I am loving this media streamer. It streams much faster than my BluRay player did. I was also surprised that it played a very large mkv file from a flash drive flawlessly. I had problems playing the file on my mac or pc. Another feature which shocked me was its cross compatibly with Mac and PC networks. When it is on, both my mac and my PC recognize the device, and I did no set-up on either. It surprisingly just popped up. It has turned out to be a great purchase.

I have had previous experience with the older WDTV and found it to be a great device. I decided to purchase this device because I really needed a dedicated box to stream media over the network and view Netflix, etc. It comes with a much larger remote then previous devices which is great. Another big part of my decision was that the WDTV Live has a Gigabit Ethernet port allowing me to flawlessly stream 1080P video files. I also tested the WiFi connection through Wireless-N. Signal strength was normal and I was able to stream HD content over the Wireless-N without any issues. If your going to use this device wireless only you will not have any trouble as long as your router is sufficient. Beautiful new GUI. Highly recommend this device to anyone!

I've had this for about six months now. When you first hook it up it needs to download a series of firmware. I bought this unit because it was cheap and at the time it was the only media player that supported 3TB HDs. I have about 300 MKV Blu-rays that play flawlessly. It only takes a minute to compile the media library and the player found metadata for most of the movies. The ones that it didn't I could do it manually. The player stores the metadata on your HD so it doesn't have to scan for it everytime. I have another 1TB HD with all my music and photos. I have over 20,000 photos and 700 GB of MP3s (music is great). When plugging this HD into the media player it would compile the media library for 20 minutes then freeze. I tried multiple times, but with so many files to compile the media player simply cannot handle it. My only solution was to go into the players settings and turn the metadata and media library features off so it just recognizes the HD and that's it. Kind of sucks, but I wanted it primarily for movies anyway and for that it works great. I haven't used the apps much except for YouTube and Pandora. Both of those apps work very well. I downloaded an app on my Android phone so I could use it as a remote. It worked the first time and then never again. Oh well, the media player's remote is small and works great. I think the only benefit of having the app on your phone is if you need to type something like on YouTube. I believe the phone app provides an on-screen keyboard. Overall I'm glad I made the decision to purchase this media player.

I upgrade mine and hand-me-down the older ones to family. I really dislike the menu system on this one. Instructions are bad because there are no instructions that cover the menu funcitons. It didn't take long to figure out, but I'm glad I bought it for myself. Runs wifi without any issues, runs wired connection without any issues. Plays about any file but a few WMV files. Takes a while to connect to two 2TB external drives, not just on the initial startup. My older ones didn't have this problem. It reads/sees them, but takes a while until it knows what files are on it. Other than that, this thing is great.

I read some of the other bad reviews and all I can say is that those reviewers must have old versions of WDTV . I had no problems with the setup. The networking was a breeze and snappy. The UI is simple to use and it is responsive. Not as bad as I have read. Surfing around the menus is not bad at all. Its not slow at all. Some of the things like Netflixs take a sec to load but Im guessing that its due to the connection speed as well as the WDTV. By a sec I actually mean like 10-20 secs to load fully. Not a big deal at all. The networking is the reason i got this over a Roku. I love that it can stream almost anything I can throw at it. Navigating to your media folders on your network is smooth and fast. Not really more to say about it. Its worth the $89 for sure. If you have a home server like I do with media that you would like to stream this is the only way to go. It wont disappoint. It might be a little tricky for the average user to get the networking and streaming working right but its not impossible. The only thing I havent used is the WIFI because i have ethernet all over my home so I didnt need the use the wifi. Ive only had to for a day and I love it already.

I purchased the WD live primarily for streaming movies within my home network. The device was simple to set up. In less than 2 minutes we were watching a movie. The user interface is easy to follow and understand. Not too fancy, but very functional. I tried a sony streamer and an Apple TV device, both which were returned prior to this purchase. This one wins hands down. Also, it is bundled with a nice set of apps that make the experience even better. All in all, this is a great little device.

I've owned this for a good 8 months now and have pretty much nothing but praise about it. As far as I'm aware, this is the only (cheap# media player that will output full 1080p, along with full Dolby surround. With a full range of built in apps, including Pandora, Netflix, Hulu Plus, AccuWeather, among tongs of others, it's by far the most rounded in my opinion. Setup can take a bit, but if you're just using it for the basic feature, you'll be watching whatever it is you're watching in no time. I do have a few small gripes, mainly being the excruciatingly slow remote response sometimes. However, I have an app on my phone#Droid) that works over WiFi that lets me control either of them whereever I am in the apartment. The only other gripe I can come up with is that if it's sitting powered on, but unused for a while, it seems to freeze up. Of course, that's my fault for not turning it off when I'm not using it :)

I used to use my PS3 for streaming purposes using DLNA with the PS3 Media Server software on my PC. Well, along came Cinavia and ruined it! I was very happy to find this WD TV Live device! It's works flawlessly with PS3 Media Server and not having to deal with Cinavia makes this device a no brainer! There are other features of the device but with streaming your own content on your network, you really don't need anything else!

I have tried and installed Apple TV, WD Live TV Gen 1, Roku 2 XS, Sony Media Player, streamed via my PC/TVersity, and use Samsung's Smart Hub built into my TV. The WD is the only one that can handle 99% of the formats I throw at it, handle standard file shares and DNLA servers. It provides the same Netflix experience as the others. Wireless setup took about 2 mintes, most of that typing my password. The menu is much faster than the WD gen 1. I will say if you have no interest in sharing media files the Roku is a cool option because of the gaming remote and Angry Birds that comes with it. The WD is the must have if you want full media streaming flexibility.

I bought this player to replace the original version of the WD TV player. What I mis-read was, the lack of support for MPEG-2. After converting all of my movies to MP4 format, everything works great again (Better then before). Internet videos, HDMI imput to full 1080P , improvements in audio a nice plus. This is great if you do not have an internet TV.

I have this WD player in my living room hooked to a 3 TB hard drive and it works flawlessly. It was extremely easy to hook up, just go through the menu items. I stream to my game room ( wireless ) with slight lag every now and then which is a wifi issue not the WD. I think this is a great product.

My Western Digital Live TV box is the best investment I ever made! My goal was to back up my massive DVD collection to a digital format. Bought a 4tb NAS drive, and simply encoded the DVD files to high quality mp4 files. The WD box finds DVD cover art, synopsis's, actor list, ect... Could not have done a smoother, slicker interface going straight off my tower computer! Love it, love it, love it!

works great. We use it for Netflix to stream on the TV. Super easy to install- power cord, HDMI cord- done! The only issue is that sometimes it logs you out of Netflix account and you have to keep closing it out and log back in. It even happened in the middle of watching a show once. Not sure if its the box itself, or the connection. Other than that, its great.

Ease of installation, low price, and small size, the latest incarnation of the WD HD TV Live provides easy wireless N connectivity, access to Netflix, Hulu, and a bunch more, plus seamlessly streams movies from a NAS attached to my router. I have X-box 360 and Roku but the latest WD is definetly my favorite.

We don't have cable so we got a Roku for our tv, love that Roku! Then I bought a second tv for my husband's "relaxation room" (I hate the term "man cave"). And he LOVES youtube, so I tried this WDtv box, because Roku does not offer youtube. The navigation is great, installation is super easy, and the remote is handy. But maaaaaaan it is slooooooooooow. We can barely get Hulu up and going because the box is slow. I don't know if I would buy it again, but we are sticking with it.