Well after much reviewing and research, I finally received my WD TV live unit this morning. In preparation I purchased a WD Elements 1TB external HDD (best value for money) and after installing the 3G-NTFS utility on my iMac, managed to copy an assortment of HD videos, music and photos for testing under the NTFS filing system. After connecting the live unit to our panasonic plasma and the network router modem, I was amazed at how simple and quick everything worked… no configuration at all necessary! Upon updating the firmware I proceeded to play, and be amazed! Practically everything played perfectly on the Live, from WMV’s to MOV’s, mp3s to jpegs and so on. I had a few problems playing my 30fps 1080p MOV files but then I realised I will need to render these to 24 fps, the latter works fine. Also some periodic pausing of one or two of my own videos done from Final Cut at 1080p and 24 fps, as if the HDD was catching up every couple of seconds or so… I assume this must be the settings I used to render the video as the original MOV files from my Canon EOS 550D played perfectly in 1080p 24 fps. Perhaps someone could help me decide on what the best settings would be in Final Cut for rendering out 1080p video to get the best quality, but not a ridiculous bandwidth? I watched a commercial 1080p demo MOV file that was recorded at 8.75 mbits/s 1920x1080 and AAC audio/H264 codec which looked stunning, so I need to try and replicate this… I think mine were well into the 20-30Mbps! Also trying to export some slideshows from Aperture 3 in HD but less options in this package for adjusting the quality.
All I can say so far is this little baby is awesome! Works perfectly well over the home network for copying to the USB drive, youtube also plays really nicely as does the streaming radio. Now all I would like is iPlayer!
Looking forward to sharing my experiences with others on the forums…
Kind regards
Simon
