Alright, so recently I have been looking for a simple way to take my hard drive of movies/music and have it playable on my TV at an on-demand type setup.
Browsed through the forums a bit and there seem to be various issues which are making me wonder if its worth dropping the 150 for, not really looking to the frustration of conflicts popping up- specifically the AAC 5.1 problem
Anyways, if I am understanding correctly, I can take my external hard drive and plug it directly into my WD Live player which is then connected to my television? Does this still need to be hooked up to my network? This is ethernet only correct? I need to buy some attachment for wireless connectivity?
Do you have issues playing back movies - specifically .avi files (xvid/divx or such)? is there a delay/stuttering or is that mostly over wireless connectivity streaming from a PC?
Very much interested in this product and hopefully someone can clear up my questions for me.
Again, I just need a way to easily play media from a hard drive on my TV ><
My first suggestion would be to look at bestbuy. I found mine sub -$150.00, actually mine was on sell for $119.00. My second suggestion would be to run a quick Cat5e cable from your router to the box. After reading other forum posts, I decided to save the money on the wireless USB device and go straight hardwire. I do not regret that decision at all. I have never experienced stuttering or the network dropping out and I often stream 4 GB 1080p movies.
My last suggestion would be to install a media share server on your main pc to pull your files from. I have been using TVersity with a 1TB external harddrive and it works beautifully. I spent about an hour trying to setup Windows Vista Media Server to share .MKV files and it never worked. As soon as I went to TVersity, I haven’t had any issues.
I am currently working on installing PlayOn so that I can stream Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon to the box - but I haven’t finished this setup yet so I won’t comment if it works right.
I have really enjoyed my box and actually canceled my Comcast cable package today. A savings of almost $60+/month.
I know there are a few other boxes coming out soon that will do a bit more than this one (Popbox & Boxee Box) but for right now, this is the best solution on the market that I have found.
As the previous poster says, you don’t need to spend $150 – Amazon routinely sells this for around $120.
You can indeed just plug an external hard drive into the Live, with the Live connected to your TV, and play movies from it. I often take one of mine over to a friends house and do exactly this (obviously not hooked to any network in any way). You can also stream data wireless or via ethernet cable if you desire, but you don’t have to do so.
AVI is a container type, and it can contain ALL kinds of things. Some play fine, others don’t. If you stick to standard video types (such as H264) and audio types (such as AC3) you won’t have any problems at all, no matter how you are playing them. If you try and play unsupported or offbeat formats they may not play, or they may have issues when playing.
I have literally hundreds of videos, all in MKV format, all of which are HD (1080p) and they all play flawlessly (I just got through showing "The Princess and the Frog to 10 people on our 9’ screen). I like the Live (I bought two of them, and need another two some day).
I am completely new to the whole media server type deal and just stumbled across this while trying to figure out a way to get away from all the burning of CD’s and such.
I never had much interaction with Hulu and the such so I can’t say I am really worried about that working with this product. I’ll just start with the “keep it simple, stupid” and plug the hard drive in the box itself for now and work to the whole streaming from the computer eventually. I will have to read up about tversity and figure out how it all works. Their website doesn’t seem to have much information on it, does it just stream media on my PC through the network or does it also stream TV shows and such from hulu also? or is that only the “pro” version? Doesn’t really explain much there
Again, thank you
ps. any ETA on those other products you mentioned? Boxee/popbox
No problem, I guess I did go a bit off topic from the external hdd question. I honestly do not have any experience in connecting my WD external hdd directly to the box, it always goes through my desktop first.
TVersity pro is the only version that works with hulu. The free version just streams the content located on your computer (in my case external hdd connected to the computer).
The popbox is available for preorder on amazon. They offer a box that has wireless integrated into the box itself without having to purchase an adapter. ( Wired | Wireless) They are expected to ship late June.
The Boxee Box is a project between Boxee (software) and DLink. I believe it is due out later this year. ( Link)
So, I went out today and picked this up, along with one of their My book 2tb drives. Had no problem setting it up, reads the media perfectly. It asked me if i wanted to upgrade the firmware, which I am a bit hesitant to do, it’s working fine right now and sometimes updates aren’t for the best, perhaps another time Had a little fun viewing the youtube on it for a bit. I havn’t tried the whole network streaming yet, still need to read up on how to set it all up. Quite satisfied so far, slowly transferring media from my DVD’s to the hard drive, though a couple of corrupt files during the burn process is frustrating me
Had a little fun viewing the youtube on it for a bit. I havn’t tried the whole network streaming yet, still need to read up on how to set it all up. Quite satisfied so far, slowly transferring media from my DVD’s to the hard drive, though a couple of corrupt files during the burn process is frustrating me 