Customer Ratings & Reviews

I am no longer using my ps3. Im buying one for every room in my house. It plays everything

good product for hooking up to the portable drive to view the files and videos

I bought this little box for local movie playback as well as a internet media box and it's been great for both. Having wired and wireless choices is great if I need to move it for playback elsewhere, and the ability to plug in USB storage devices is great when I just want to plug and play a movie.

Concept was good. I was looking for a device to approximate the features of a Media Center Extender, but just not happy with it. I wanted the ability to natively access content on a PC share, which worked, but the overall implementation was not good. It took a few tries to get it to connect o the windows share. Then, I pointed it to a folder with DVD VOBs and it was just very clunky to navigate the video content. Better than a Roku for me, but still not as a good as Media Center Extender since I already have a Media Center PC.

The WD is slow and is unreponsive alot of the time and take forever to load a app returned it right away and bought a vizio costar instead

I researched other similar products and the Western Digital TV Live was clearly the best choice. It plays every video format that I could find. It even plays videos directly from an ISO file. I own an older WD TV Live Plus which I thought was great, but this newer version is even better. The user interface is a better design and it has wireless capabilities.

excellent product, no problems ,easy to use, quiet opertation

I have been buying Western Digital drives for years as my first choice, so I thought this product was a no brainer. I really wanted it to work. I have an HDMI connection to my TV and a digital optical connection to my receiver. I plugged in a 4GB flash drive and it took about 10 minutes to scan it. I plugged in a 1TB flash drive and it took about 3 minutes to scan it. I think it should have some kind of internal memory to at least remember the last drive I hooked up without doing yet another scan when I unplug it or turn it off. One of the kids turned it on accidentally and I didn't realize it for 5 months because I gave up trying to use it due to all the issues listed. The photo menu was useless. Of 2500 pictures, it took forever to navigate just to a few of the screens, and once selected, it took a long time to render. The video menu showed all of my videos in a huge seemingly random list. Selecting one starts it playing. I soon discovered that although the digital sound is reasonably good, subtitles are not available, the picture stutters from time to time, the time display is inaccurate, fast forward goes where I want it and then stops somewhere completely else, and eventually the movie stops in the middle of a segment and goes back to the menu. I did not try the network option as I do not have one. I'm going to toss this $100 mistake on the techno garbage heap and stick with my DVDs, BDs, and 3D BDs on my 3D TV.

I got this in July and it seemed to work OK-ish at playing video files stored on an external WD hard drive. Then they released the new firmware and it ruined the player. I can't play anything anymore, it freezes constantly, doesn't recognize my hard drive, cuts out the audio, doesn't connect to the network etc. So many bugs I cannot even name all of them. I have tried everything including rolling back to previous firmware and still it doesn't work. This thing is useless. The only thing it is good for is streaming Netflix, but there are cheaper streaming media players out there that handle that.

Works great with my WD - 3TB My Book Live Personal Cloud Storage Home Network Drive - Charcoal Metallic.

I upgraded to this model from the non wifi version, note I also upgraded hard drive to WD 3Tb network drive at same time. So far I am disappointed with it, it will often lock up or drop network connection, when this happens it takes forever to reconnect, and often requires a disconnect of power supply. Other small changes are also annoying, like the ability to delay or advance subtitles to sync with voice is now gone on this model. I also found that this model does not remove power from the USB ports, so my connected hard drives will remain on after the player is shut down, this is different to previous model, which will shut down connected drives after a minute or so. I contacted WD support, total waste of time, unable to answer issue after multiple follow ups. I would only recommend older model right now. Yes firmware was up to date

Just got this today, installation was easy. like everybody else saids, I don't like the smuushy buttons. the Interface is slow, just not very snappy. I'm running this on wireless and when ever I play movies over the internet, it sluggish and at times long waits. even for music and pictures. hummm, I dunno I may take this back and just get the sony PS3

Other than support for HBO Go and other premium network services, it's a great box. Love the optical outlet and pass through support

Remember when you used to be able to buy something and it just worked? Now it seems that since everything is connected over the internet and firmware can be developed to fix/improve an item, companies rely on us to do the quality control for them. We are all beta testers and not only do we work for free, we also have to pay for the prototypes. They don't care if things go out the door half baked since they can always get US to report bugs and then they simply keep upgrading the firmware and software! Seems like this is the case with just about any electronic gadget out there. This little toy is very cool when it works. It does play back just about any format of movie or sound. It looks and sounds really good. Unfortunately out of the blue, something will go wrong. The device has to be reset, and all the settings have to be reset by you. Trying to surf Youtube is a nightmare. Not only is it slooooowwwww but good luck getting it to work. One day there's no sound and after tweaking forever to get it to work, it loses sound again. I get to the point I want to toss this thing out the window, but it's sooo convenient! If only they would iron out the bugs and pay us for troubleshooting, it wouldn't be so bad.

Been using this for several weeks, and so far I've been very impressed! Huge improvement over the older WD we owned. I'm streaming movies, videos, tv shows, etc. from a pc in the basement and watching them on the TV in my family room on the first floor over my home wireless network.

I have converted my dvd's to digital and saved them on a 3TB WD cloud drive. This media player is a great way to watch them in other rooms using wireless capabilities. We subscribe to MLB.com and the player is a great way to watch the games in different rooms of the house.

I have 3 of them and 2 earlier generation models. (The earlier i used homebrew on because its reading from network shares was horriblly slow). I am really happy with these newer models. Quick read from NTFS shares on a network. I havent tested read/write locally etc.

Bought this product in order to stream Game of Thrones and other movies to my TV from an external hard drive. While the remote provided makes interacting with it tedious, you can download a remote app to your phone or tablet that makes it MUCH easier!

Getting it to see shared files on my windows machine was a pain. Had to go into windows and manually share each folder. Took forever. It will only look at one video source at a time. So if your videos are on two separate devices or if your files are in two separate folders on the same device, you can only look at one at a time. It does not get metadata for your movies. Meaning that you just see the file name and maybe an extracted thumbnail. Some of the WD versions have a custom software you can load onto it if you enjoy hacking stuff (I do) but this one has a locked bootloader so you can't even fix these issues. Ended up taking it back and getting a Boxee Box. I was hesitant about it because it costs and little more and doesn't have hulu. But the advantages for playing local content are clear. It pulls the movie data and dvd covers down from imdb and it organizes everything in two screens, one for movies and one for tv and displays them with album art. Add as many locations as you like, Boxee puts them all in the same easy to use sortable interface. Clear winner for local content.

I got this for the purpose of streaming personal videos and Blu Rays from my computer wirelessly to my TV. Ease of use and installation very poor because I've spent many frustrating hours getting this thing to play nicely with Windows.....Sometimes you have to restart, sometimes you must "reset", other times it is necessary to unplug and wait a minute. The you often must re-input your username/password info #awkward with remote# It is still inconsistent. After the last update, it can't handle a lossless m2ts file even when directly connected via Ethernet. Its wireless n, but only on the 2.4ghz freq. so I had to get an extender #as a bridge for 5ghz# to enable high bit rate video to play without shuttering. Support is fair and it only takes about two minutes to get a live person. In conclusion, this device has a lot of potential capability if they would get the software right!