Hello, i am considering purchasing the new WD TV Live, does anyone know if i would be able to stream movies from itunes? I believe the format is . mov ? Thanks.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330
"
File Formats Not Supported
Does not support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes Store, Movielink, Amazon Unbox, and Vongo"
What about my dvd collection that i have copied onto my mac and store in itunes?
As long as it’s not protected content purchased from the iTunes store, and as long as the files meet the device playback specs, then they should play, if the WDTV has access to them. If they don’t meet the playback specs (or have DRM), then they won’t play.
.3g2/.3gp/.mov/.mp4
Video:
AVC
MPEG/4
Audio:
AAC
AC3
MPEG Audio
Ok. I was going to use HandBreak to back up all of my dvd’s. If i do this and i DO NOT use itunes, and instead store them on an external WD drive, i presume this would be the easier way of doing this?
Well, to be honest, if you haven’t backed them up yet, and were planning on using Handbrake, I’d make .mkv files instead of .mov.
These WDTV devices seem to love the Matroska container, and seem to be rather finicky about some others.
Plus, then you can keep the subtitles and chapters, if you so desire.
I could be misremembering, but I don’t think these WD players handle .mov chapters, and I’m not sure about subs either.
Hopefully you are not misremebering the way Andy Pettitte did!
Thank you for the help!
You’re welcome.
Just remember, it’s only a suggestion. 
But the consensus of a large portion of folks who use these WD players seems to be that .mkv tends to be the most forgiving and trouble-free container.
And, since I don’t use .mov myself, I don’t have anything handy to test with (although I could make some).
But where the files are stored, should be rather irrelevant, within reason. If they’re on a networked device and shared, the WDTV should be able to play them, as long as the availble bitrate isn’t exceeded. Naturally, if you do have an external, and hook that directly to the player, there tends to be few issues with playing local files.
What is the available bitrate? i tried looking this up and could not find it.
On a side note i just used handbreak for the first time, successfully. I backed up Meet the Parents as an .mkv file.
I am tempted to back up all of my remaining dvds, would it be suggested to wait on this as i have not yet purchased the live hub. is there a chance these file formats would not play?
What program could I use with windows to rip my files in to MKV format? I could use mac also, but handbreak is kind of clunky
Here are the Devices my family uses to view videos:
Blue Ray DVD player (Wired network)
DVD player
Windows Vista computer (Wired network)
Windows XP computer (Wired network)
Windows XP laptop (Wireless network)
Windows 7 laptop (Wireless network)
Linux Mint (Wired network)
Macbook Pro (Wireless network)
Kindle Fire (Wireless network)
iPhone 4S
iPod classic
Here’s how our movies are stored:
On The original DVDs
On a WD Mybook Live NAS drive
Here’s how I solved the problem of getting my videos on almost all of those devices:
The Blue Ray and the DVD player use purchased DVDs. I gave up trying to get the Blue Ray player to see the videos on the network. It worked, kinda, but needed a Windows media server. yuck, Yuck YUCK. I’m very dissappointed!
The weakest link of those devices that can play movies off the NAS is the Kindle Fire, The best video format for it also happens to work very well for all the other devices: H.264 in an MP4 container with a .M4V extension on the file name.
So, using DVD43 and Handbrake, I rip the videos using the built-in iPad preset and I uncheck the Large File Size setting. The only thing I make sure of is that the H.264 setting is set to RF:20. That way the videos don’t take up too much room (about 1 - 2 gigs per video).
For the Kindle Fire and the iPhones, we have WD2go. It works very well.
For the iPods we use iTunes to move the videos onto the devices.
For the TV we have a WD TV Live. You do not need iTunes to view videos this way.
Almost everything works!!! (Blue Ray Drive being the exception).
