WD adds Miracast support to feed-slinging tellybox gizmo

WD has updated its “sling your media to the TV” box and brought out the WD TV Personal Edition, adding Miracast support. It's a media player that, according to the bumf, "plays virtually any media file stored on USB and network storage devices or any computer on the home network." It supports file formats like MKV, MP4, AVI, …

[John P]

I've had one of these for a couple of years now, but successive updates have rendered it unable to reliably connect to the shares on my NAS and it is now getting replaced by a Raspberry Pi running XBMC. Shame really, as it was a great little box initially.

[Jay 2]

Great little box

I hope this new functionality is pushed out via firmware update as I purchased a WD TV Live about three weeks ago!

It's a great little box and indeed plays almost everything I've managed to throw at it so far.

[Richard Boyce]

Re: Great little box

My old WD TV has had its share of problems, and the few updates tend to add as many problems as they fix. For example, I also have compatibility problems with network shares.

And speaking of compatibility, I see that WD are cranking up the claims of media compatibility, past the limit of what is reasonable, IMHO. With claims like "Play all your media files on your TV", and "You have it, we'll play it.", there are going to be quite a few annoyed customers. For example, most WD TV boxes have been unable to play my .ape audio files (yes, I know I can transcode to FLAC), despite this not being an exotic format and it looks like this new box can't play those files either.

[Tom 35]

Re: Great little box

Lots of luck with the firmware update. The one I bought got a hardware update (didn't change the model number, you had to check the SN# to know what one you had) and people with the old version only got one minor bug fix, then it was "go buy the new one".

[Nate Amsden]

works well for me

I have used a WD TV since last fall exclusively with TV Mobili running on a linux box (DLNA), works very well. It doesn't play flash video (I have a few downloaded music videos that I need to convert from flash), but other than that I have no complaints.

TV Mobli says I have 32GB of music(3k files) and about 2T of video(2900 files), and thanks perhaps to it's indexing browsing from the WD TV is instantaneous. Haven't had a need to try NFS or other data access methods.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: works well for me

on that note per the article saying itunes not supported, you could hook up tv mobli which can import itunes and access the data through DLNA.

I am not affiliated with tv mobli, but the product has worked very well for me and is pretty cheap and easy to setup.

[John Nieurzyla]

Prefer Asus

They do not mention the big problem of the units getting too hot, when its switched off in standby mode, the unit does get very hot. The local WD help line is responsive, and will replace units under warranty, but no one is very knowledgeable to technical questions.

It does not mention if it has hdmi connection? or updated software for subtitles ie, manually altering the subtitle to delay or advance to speech, or select the correct subtitle file.

I will be going back to Asus.

John

[Anonymous Coward]

keep getting fractured

Got a stack of WD's round here, everytime a new one is about appear they force a firmware upgrade out that renders the last one useless suckered 3 times not again. RPI RaspBMC forever.