WD TV Live - Pre-Purchase Questions

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Family has a 10yr old DVD player and well, time for an upgrade. I have a media server running but, for the rest of the house they just have a DVD Player that has DivX and that’s it. I wanted to share my library, but an HTPC would be too confusing for them.

I decided the WD TV Live would probably be the best cheapest solution, I liked the WD TV Play, but apparently not as many codecs and no DTS (which was the main issue).

I plan to get them the player, and probably a 500GB external drive to keep plugged in. Though wondered…

  1. If I plug in a USB stick into the front to watch a movie, can I transfer that file to the 500GB drive plugged in the back? or do I have to disconnect the 500GB drive and attach to a computer everytime I want to transfer files to it?

  2. My media player runs on Win7x64, I assume I can network to my library on my PC. Can I copy through WiFi files from the library to the 500GB? Also when shared can I lock it so it’s read-only so they don’t wipe my stuff out?

  3. My media player runs XBMC. It’s great because it scrapes info from online so when I look through my file list I get movie posters for each movie, the cast, write up, etc… does the WD TV Live do anything like that?

Reviews and such seem to miss this information…

2
  1. yes you can, copy/move/delete from and to any drives from the USB.
  2. yes indeed
  3. yes the WD has built in scraping, thou limited compared to using a client like thumbgen to pre-scrape.
3

Nothing better than getting a quick reply that answers the questions. 

Sometimes you post in a forum and you get replies that don’t answer a thing. :smiley:

Thanks for the info… time to replace a 10yr old DVD Player. :smiley:

4

Actually 1 more question

Will the WD TV Live work with an external DVD drive? 

and… USB or externally powered?

5

No, it won’t work with USB-based DVD drives.

6

Ah well, time they copied stuff to MP4 like I did anyways. :smiley: