Hi what are the benefits if any, of having a box like the wdtvlive , rather than just plugging your laptop directly into your tv. From all accounts the wireless dongle capabilities when connected to a box like this are not worth bothering with due to very slow file transfere speeds from a laptop to the box itself, i may be wrong and they might be lots of advantages and if they are i stand corrected. I have spent the last 2 weeks looking at lots of different network media players and unless you have wired connection, they seems little point of having one. My £10 lead which plugs from my laptop into my tv seems much better value, like i said i could be wrong!
Well, namely the fact that you don’t have to plug the laptop into your TV! 
Typically, only the newest laptops have HDMI interfaces and have video cards capable of driving 1920x1080p video.
But if your laptop fits that bill, then there’s certainly nothing wrong with using it… It’s just more wear & tear on an expensive device. :)
Just out of Curiosity how long would it take roughly to copy a 1gb avi movie over a wireless connection using the dongle,i.e from laptop to wdtvlive box without a wired connection to the laptop,the wdtvlive box would be connected via ethernet connection.
If your wireless works well, you should be able to copy a 1GB file from a wireless device to a wired device in about 2 minutes.
If BOTH devices are wireless, it’ll take double that.
Hi thats not to bad, from what i have been reading on lots of forums, i thought it might have been 10 times that, most people were saying with there connection set correctly they could average about 6-7MB/s .
Does your laptop have a remote?
At the end of the day it comes down to your needs. I store a lot of music and photos as well as video files on my PC which can all be accessed via the media player while sitting on the couch.
daneyboy wrote:
Hi thats not to bad, from what i have been reading on lots of forums, i thought it might have been 10 times that, most people were saying with there connection set correctly they could average about 6-7MB/s .
I did preface my statement with “If your wireless works well.” ;)
To put it bluntly, most people have no clue at all how to properly setup, manage and maintain a wireless network, and then blame the appliances when it doesn’t work well.
When I copy files to/from my Live Hub (whose network performance isn’t much better than the WDTV Live+) via wireless, I can usually get 9 to 11 megabytes per second.
With my WD Live
Wireless N: I get a transfer rate of 8-9MB/second
Wired: I get 6-7MB/second
But for streaming 1080p, best performance without any stuttering is from wired.
