I would like to purchase the WD TV LIve Media Player, but I don’t want to waste my time if it won’t work with my current setup. I am running WIndows 7 with a Linksys WRT54GL router. I would like to use wi-fi to view photos and small avi videos stored on my computer on my HDTV two rooms away. Will this work without being painfully slow? I would like the transition from photo to photo to be snappy. I understand that I would have to purchase some sort of USB dongle to receive the wi-fi signal. Thanks for any help.
Yeah, it’s not “snappy” by any means (by contrast, my AppleTV which otherwise does a terrible job at nearly everything else, does play the photos as quickly as if they were on a computer locally).
The Live isn’t a good choice for photo viewing, IMHO (playing movies, on the other hand, is something it excels at).
Oh, and you might check into what capabilities your HDTV has. Most new ones (those in the last two years or so) can accept local USB drives for playback of some media types. For photos they work extremely well (again, not so well for movies and other things but YMMV).
My own HDTV started me on this long journey with the Live units – I’m glad I got there, but if all I wanted to do was look at photos it would have been a far different story.
Thanks to all of the responders to this post. My HDTV does have a built-in USB port and can read photos and music from a thumb drive. However, my HDTV is slow and won’t play the little avi video files which my Canon Elf Point and Shoot camera takes. I was hoping to buy a device which would have a “snappy” transition between photos and plays these avi video files. Is the WD TV box (not the “Live” version) right for me? How “snappy” is it when reading from a thumb drive?
You might want to ask this question on that forum – while some folks here will have experience with it, most of us are only Live/Plus users.
Being able to display photos extremely quickly is one thing AppleTV does extremely well, so you might look into that (but you would have to convert your AVIs to MP4 – the drawback of ATV is that it will only play those things which can be brought into iTunes, and not even all of those. So photos = superb. Everything else = not so much).
The slowness of displaying even medium res photos on the Live is a big disappointment to me (on my ATV I can pop through photos as fast as I can press the button – on the Live I’d be lucky to get though a photo every two seconds or so. Very frustrating when trying to flip through things to find something you want to see).
