So I just bought the WD Live Plus on Black Friday since it was only 99 bucks and after first browsing it it really doesn’t seem that dif from the regular WD Live that I already had on another TV. I have two 2TB drives, one for Blu Ray Rips and one for TV Show Rips and I was hoping for a better interface with a sort of IMDB browsing for movies that would allow maybe Blu Ray covers or Movie Posters for my files (maybe even a short Info) or some kind of option to sort my TV Show files to something like TV.com does. I read the Ideas section and it seems that ideas like this were suggested almost a year ago and have been ignored.
So my question is should I return my device? I know some of you out there have a Boxee or a Roku. Do you like that better? Is there something out there i should check out? I couldn’t care less about Netflix or facebook/Flickr cuz I have a computer and a PS3 for that so I’m really just looking for a Jukebox for my Movie/TV Collection. It’s my fault for not doing enough research beyond looking up Seagates FlexTV but I want an innocent opinion and a community like this seems to be the best place.
So I just bought the WD Live Plus on Black Friday since it was only 99 bucks and after first browsing it it really doesn’t seem that dif from the regular WD Live that I already had on another TV. I have two 2TB drives, one for Blu Ray Rips and one for TV Show Rips and I was hoping for a better interface with a sort of IMDB browsing for movies that would allow maybe Blu Ray covers or Movie Posters for my files (maybe even a short Info) or some kind of option to sort my TV Show files to something like TV.com does. I read the Ideas section and it seems that ideas like this were suggested almost a year ago and have been ignored.
So my question is should I return my device? I know some of you out there have a Boxee or a Roku. Do you like that better? Is there something out there i should check out? I couldn’t care less about Netflix or facebook/Flickr cuz I have a computer and a PS3 for that so I’m really just looking for a Jukebox for my Movie/TV Collection. It’s my fault for not doing enough research beyond looking up Seagates FlexTV but I want an innocent opinion and a community like this seems to be the best place.
Thanks for your time
-Kris
You answered the question yourself :) If you do not need Netflix then get another Live unit. If you need a unit for the movie/tv collection then you may not need a Roku. Boxee is buggy. From my experience the Live and Live Plus are better suited for what you need. imdb? Then get the Live Hub - I never used the Hub but maybe someone here can confirm that the HUB uses imdb.
The only functional difference is that the Live Plus has a DRM-capable chip, and the Live doesn’t.
At this point, the only difference that causes in operation is that the Live can’t connect to Netflix (and never will be able to), while the Live Plus can.
The possibility exists (but I wouldn’t hold my breath) for WD to add other DRM-protected services in the future, so even if you have no immediate use for Netflix at the minute, if the Live and the Live Plus were the same price, I’d still grab the Plus, between those 2 choices. It’s true that you should only buy something for what it can do now, and not for what you hope it might do in the future (because it just may never happen), but if you can have additional options in the future, for no extra cost, then why not?
And the metadata that the Live Hub pulls in is not from IMDB, but from TheMovieDatabase.org. If the movie sheets are that important to you, and you don’t want to go with third-party firmware, then you’d probabbly be happier with a Live Hub instead of the Live or the Live Plus.
I have one on order, so I have not tested this, but here is my plan. I use something called “MyMovies” with Windows Media Center on Windows 7, which run on my Media Center PC. I have about 8 TB of rips on there. Every time I rip a movie I register it in the MyMovies Collection Management app and it puts a .jpg of the cover art in the movie’s folder. From researching the WD TV it can look at that .jpg and display it as the cover art. This should be the perfect solution for you, assuming you have a PC with your drives attached. I don’t think you actually even need Windows Media Center if you are just trying to stream movies to your WD TV. You can still use Mymovies.
