Difference between WD TV Live and WD TV Play

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Hi all,

Hope you can help with what I’m sure is a very easy question…  Is there much difference between the TV Live and the TV Play media streamers?

I’m very new to the media streaming world and a few months ago I bought a WD 2TB NAS drive for the my network and up to now I’ve been using my laptop connected to the TV through HDMI to watch movies I’ve got stored on the hard drive.  But I don’t want to have to keep booting up and connecting my laptop all the time.

I’ve got a dual band CISCO router and what I’d really like to do is set up media streamers in each room, all connected to the 5GHz channel so that they get less interference.  I won’t be doing any streaming from the internet it will all be from the NAS drive which mostly stores AVI files.

So I suppose there are two questions.  The first being is there much difference between these two models?  The second being do either (or both) of these models connect to the 5GHz channel?  I’ve read some reviews on these models but can’t seem to find anything that compares the two or that says if they can connect to 5GHz.

Hope someone can help.

Cheers

Alex

2

The big difference is that the Play is really centered around internet apps / services and you can only stream from attached storage or from a media server. It also cannot play meg2 video.

The live can play most files from attached storage and network drives via media server or network shares. It can also play DVD iso image files with menus.

Given this and your requirements then you have only the option of the WD Live (gen3).

3

I have the WDTVLive SMP, and it seems to only connect at the 2.4GHz channel. I remember the original high-end Roku did 2.4/5, but the Roku 2 only does 2.4 as well. Dual-band on these devices seems to be very rare.

You can try either powerline networking or a dual-band wireless bridge connected via ethernet though.