A couple of questions before I buy

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Hey all, I’ve just seen the other couple of posts regarding pre-purchase, but they don’t have the same questions as me, so here goes :wink:

Looking to get a WDTV Live Hub shortly but…

  • What kind of transfer speeds can I expect when copying media to the internal disk via a Gigabit network?
  • Can I expect similar speeds when copying off? (Not that I’ll be doing much of this <–)
  • Am I right in assuming that the unit will automatically get metadata (backdrops, synopsis, actors etc) for my movie collection, or do I have to click Get Info on each film?
  • Also at this time it cannot get TV Show info, or it’s flaky at best?
  • Re the above, I can still use Thumbgen to get this info for me and make nice backdrops etc?
  • Does the unit use 2.5in HDD’s and can these be replaced if they become full?

Many thanks in advance for any info you can give.

Regards,

Nathan

2
  • About 10 to 12 megabytes per second.
  • Yes.
  • No, there’s nothing automatic about it.   It’s a manual process.
  • Third party tools (like mine) can be used to get info from the TV Database.
  • Yes, but you’ll need to modify the XML to make it compatible (unless there’s been a new version of Thumbgen recently)
  • Yes, the internal drive is 2.5".   It’s not considered to be user-replaceable.   You’ll void your warranty.
3

Thanks for the reply, that clears a lot of things up!

All in all it looks like this box will do 90% of the things I’d ideally like, but be more reliable and user friendly than a Windows Media Center PC. 

Oh, one more quesiton! Is there any way of quickly backing the content up to say an attached USB hard drive? Or would I need to copy it back across my LAN?

Thanks again!

Nathan

4

It depnds on how you organize your media on the internal drive.  

You can copy a whole folder using the UI (but your Hub will make you wait while it does it), so if you start with everything in one folder, that shouldn’t be a difficult task…

5

Ah, so if when I get it I create a top level folder called say My Media and under that I have my Movies, TVShows etc folders, I’ll just be able to plug in a USB drive and use the GUI to drop that My Media folder onto it?

I’m guessing that should be relatively quick (compared to ethernet) if its a USB 2.0 drive with a SATA II disk in it?

Nathan