Just on the cusp of buying a WD Live HD player, but first, I need to be sure I know what I’m getting. Because after agonising over blu-ray burners and disks, and so on, this seems too good to be true.
Okay. Is it the case that… I can edit my Canon’s HD footage in, say, Premiere Elements 7, then save that footage as an uncompressed file to my external hard drive, then take that hard drive to my living room and connect it up to the WD Live Player, and then play the movie through it, in full High Definition, on my Panasonic HD LCD TV?
The Live will play videos up to 1920x1080i30, 1920x1080p24 or 1280x720p60 – so it will play, for example, my own Canon HD HF10 videos just fine. And, yes, I do exactly what you say (namely, edit my video in Elements, save out uncompressed, and view on my HDTV, although it’s a Samsung and not a Panny :>).
Yes, it does seem too good to be true at times – I also encode my blu-ray discs to my hard drive and watch them there – and quite frankly I would have expected it to cost a lot more, but these types of media players are all coming in around the $100 mark (you can usually get the Live at Amazon for around $120). I ended up buying two of them (and am in the market for a third).
Your only problem will be disc space – as you know, these uncompressed files eat up lots of disc space. If you find that to be an issue for you, I’d recommend looking into the freeware Handbrake which can compress your videos for you and still maintain excellent HD quality (my blu-ray encodes are indistinguisable from the originals, at 1/3 the size). It will work just fine on your own videos.
Mike, thanks for that. I’ve since saved a movie uncompressed to my 1T external HDD and played it on the WD, and I have to say it’s absolutely unbelievable! The quality is just crazy! Can’t credit that it was so simple to do.
With a 1 Terrabyte HDD, I’m not going to have problems with space. And the WD is so small and light, I’ll probably just take it whenever I visit friends to show my movies.
…With a 1 Terrabyte HDD, I’m not going to have problems with space…
Hehh… That’s what I thought about 3 months ago when I started this project. After ripping 300 + DVDs, a handful of BD’s, and a few hours of raw footage from a Kodak Zi8 HD Videocam, my 1TB is about 75% full. And I’m still not done…
And it still has to be BACKED UP! My 1TB backup drive can only hold one full ghost and a few incrementals. I don’t like that. I’m thinking of going to Carbonite for backups (UNLIMITED STORAGE!)
Considering a QNAP TS-410 and 4 WD 2 Tbyte drives in a RAID5 array…
My Media Server (Win 7x64) tower has 4 SATA ports unused in it, (two 1TB drives, a DVD-RW and a BD-R are plugged in) and two eSata ports in back, but no room in the case to mount 4 drives.
You are right, my friend. The old expression is you never have enough memory or disc space (nowadays the memory issue – for the moment – is kind of moot, with even 64k OS systems seldom having programs that can access more than 4GB at a time).
My PC has 4.5TB and I have external drives to back all that up (because ALL drives fail – just a question of time) and I still don’t have nearly enough space. Today I’ll get my NAS up and running and that will add 3TB more and *should* more or less take care of my media needs for the immediate future (and if the NAS works I’ll get another).
In my case, as an amateur film maker with very few films completed so far, one T is enough for the showing of even my longest film, (when I get around to making it).
But I agree, you can’t have too much storage, and I’m sure I will continue to buy external HDDs over time. I’ll probably wind up with as many HDDs as I’ve got movies in my library!
