Western Digital WD TV Live – Next Generation Streaming Media Player Review

Next-Gen WD TV Performance

The WD TV Live GUI is one that Mochi has developed and refined since introducing it to the WD TV Live Hub last year. The Mochi design is by far our favorite implementation of a GUI on a set-top media player Yes, we even like it better than the Apple TV GUI. On the WD TV Live Hub, the software was quick to respond and pleasing to the eye. It helped that the Live Hub played everything in the world including Blu-ray ISOs and had 1TB of on-board storage. Since the Live Hub has been our favorite media player for such a long time, we were really interested to see how the new WD TV Live performed and what major differences the two machines had.

After confirming language, television resolution, and network connectivity, the WD TV Live was set up and ready to roll. We took a number of different multimedia files and tested them for performance via USB drive, Ethernet, and wireless.

Every file in our suite played without hesitation or error. What we thought would be the most challenging our Blu-ray ISO files – played too. In fact, Western Digital quietly improved the audio capabilities by allowing the WD TV Live box to decode Dolby TrueHD sound. In the past, our WD TV Live Hub would only pass the discrete audio signals so that your receiver could do the decoding.

Like we wrote earlier, all our files played flawlessly and we had no problem when using the Ethernet connection or the USB port with an attached hard drive. When using the built in wireless-N, we were able to stream 720p high-definition files as well. We didnt have as much luck playing 1080p or ISO files via wireless. Most times these files would have a very long load time and when they started to play, the files would skip or pause. Some of the ISOs that we tested over wireless wouldnt even load. Honestly, the WD TV Lives wireless performance didnt bother us one bit. Having wireless capability to play 720p files to anywhere in the home or office without running wires is worth a lot. The Western Digital player really does outperform many of the competitors on the market in this regards