All,
I am in the market to buying a Media hub and the WD live hub was on my list. After scanning through this forum, I have noticed that there there are the usual bugs as with any device as well as some more serious flaws.
The key areas that I am looking for in the device are :
1 - quick access to movies as I intend to rip my DVD collection and have them as ISO’s ( unless someone thinks it could be in a better format or the device as I believe ISO’s retain subtitles?? Please tell me if I am wrong as I haven’t started ripping yet)
2 - The ability to view all the films by box art or .jpg files of the film
3 - Able to stream from my buffalo live NAS drive, but also use it to backup the movies on the live hub.
I am not one who wants to play around too much with the firmware but what I listed is sort of what I would expect from media hub as standard.
Thoughts from current owners of the live hub or potential owners would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your time in reading this.
MadMerlin
1- 100% of my DVD Rips are ISO.
In some cases, I further rip them down to MKV if I don’t care about anything but the main feature.
3- Backup? Well, if you do the backup using an external program, that’s fine… But there’s no backup agent on the Hub itself…
You might consider buying the WD TV Live Streaming Media Player instead… It’s quite a bit cheaper. It doesn’t have the internal storage, but you can get 2X the storage in an external USB drive for about the same price and still do your backups.
Thanks for your reply Tony.
What benefits are there to further ripping the .ISO file to an MKV file? I have seen both that and the M2TS. Does it offer a better quality?
As for the backup, I just want to make sure that I ccan take the files off from the device onto my NAS drive
To be honest, I have looked at the WD TV live but much prefer the GUI interface of the Live Hub. I also like the idea of having all my movies on the device that has the HDMI out and not necessarily streamed although my PS3 has been streaming but want a dedicated movie hub.
MKV is about 1/4 to /10th the size of a DVD ISO depending on how you compress it.
No, it’s not better quality. If anything, it’s worse, but it’s about what is PERCEPTABLE quality.
I am not talking about the WDTV Live HD, I’m talking about the WDTV Live Streaming Media Player. It was just released two weeks ago.
It has the identical UI as the Hub.
Thanks again Tony and for Livehubber. Invaluable comments.
Converting from ISO to MKV certainly seems to give you back alot of extra storage.
Hmmm, I have not seen that model Tony, just going onto google now for inspection :-). If I do look at the streamer option, I will need to check what rate it can stream and if it gets affected by other network traffic. It will be via a cable than wireless but might also look into USB connectivity now too.
As for the swapping between the storage options to show your media, that is a bit of a negative but there is a bit of logic there as it obviously can only read from the one source. Fair play, but I will be looking to having everying in the one place and easily accessible.
Has anyone experienced any noise from the internal fan as I have yet to come across a fan that doesnt make noise eventually as the bearings go.
One final comment, the topic of displaying by box art imagery seems to be an iffy area. I like the idea of showing all videos with the box art of the film as if it was my own on demand style media. Is this possible without hacking it?
Thanks again all for your comments.
Has anyone experienced any noise from the internal fan as I have yet to come across a fan that doesnt make noise eventually as the bearings go.
One final comment, the topic of displaying by box art imagery seems to be an iffy area. I like the idea of showing all videos with the box art of the film as if it was my own on demand style media. Is this possible without hacking it?
Thanks again all for your comments.
I haven’t noticed any noise, but then again as I mentioned, I’m hard of hearing. No one else in the house has mentioned it being loud though.
As for the box art, unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean… there are a couple different ways to view your video content in terms of layout. Two of those would allow you to view by box/cover art, which you can see from links below:
Moviesheets type style - you should know that this one also loads rolling images related to the media, which the box pulls from the net in real-time. Can make viewing this way a bit cumbersome and stuttery.
Tile/thumbnail style - this is what I use… you can select to show less or more thumbnails per page view. Sorry I couldn’t find a site with better quality images, but you’ll get the idea of all the Hub’s native viewing options. Scroll down to the videos/dossiers pics.
I know some have hacked their box with Moviesheets or something similar, but I’m not that gutsy right now and the tiled Hub look suits my purposes. I _ have _ been guilty of switching to the Moviesheets type view when other people are over, just to show off a bit :mantongue:
