Filed under: Hardware
WD TV provides subtle support for Mac-format drives
It wasn't the splashiest product introduction ever, but last week's launch of Western Digital's $130 WD TV high-definition media player may have caused a few smiles for Mac users. The playback unit -- a simple configuration of a USB2 port for connecting a hard drive, and either composite (SD) or HDMI signal output -- supports a veritable alphabet soup of audio, video and photo formats for playback, including the eminently Mac-friendly AAC and H.264 codecs (unprotected content only, so no joy with iTunes Store purchases).
The unit also supports drives formatted in HFS+ as long as you turn off journaling, which is a first for third-party media players as far as I know; while the Mac could easily write to a FAT32-formatted drive for media exchange (as long as file sizes stayed below 24 GB), enabling HFS+ is a very nice gesture towards detente with the Apple-loving world.
The WD TV is available now and should work with any TV that supports composite or HDMI inputs. Without network connectivity, iTunes sync and support for protected content, it's no Apple TV -- but at $100 less for a BYOStorage player, it may just fit the bill. We'll try to get our hands on a review unit and see if we can stump it with ancient QuickTime clips and legacy MP3 files.
Update: Our pals at dealnews.com report that Dell is discounting these handy units by $30 right now.
[via Macworld]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mrsteveman1 said 2:48PM on 11-13-2008
HFS+ but without journaling, something tells me this is a Linux box.
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jrog said 2:52PM on 11-13-2008
Have several of these at my work for testing and digital signage. It's an amazing little box, and it plays just about everything you through at it. It can loop all the movies or just loop an individual, which is great for that purpose.
I've downloaded many 1080p quicktime trailers and set them all up as a looping demo video.
I also can play back content from the Hauppauge HD-PVR component capture HD box with no issues either. This box is great for what it does.
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mcdj said 2:57PM on 11-13-2008
Actually it works fine with HFS+ Journaled. You just don't get the level of organization that non-journaled offers. With non-journaled or FAT32, you can see folders, browse files by date, music by tags, etc. With journaled, you just get a big list of files, only separarated by kind; movies/music/photos.
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Eric said 3:08PM on 11-13-2008
Mac OS X can write to NTFS with the NTFS 3G driver for mac so you are not limited to FAT32. It does require MacFuse to be installed.
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dagamer34 said 3:15PM on 11-13-2008
Do my eyes deceive me or can this little box handle 1080p MKV files!!! That'd be amazing for all of the *cough* legal *cough HD videos out there! :)
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Erik said 3:34PM on 11-13-2008
It does indeed support MKV, and beautifully too. I have one and the only problem I've had is with MKV files using DTS audio as my TV doesn't support DTS. I've played AVI and MPG as well and all worked great.
bob said 4:08PM on 11-13-2008
you can passthrough an mkv to an mp4 and just re-encode the audio to aac, takes about 2 minutes and NO loss of video quality, quicktime will do this
dagamer34 said 4:35PM on 11-13-2008
Instructions bob!
Andrew Wickliffe said 3:33PM on 11-13-2008
The subtitle support is SRT only...
which is kind of useless
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mino said 3:47PM on 11-13-2008
I bought this unit at BestBuy ($99 sale price) about 10 days ago to use it primarily for playing HD videos from my Canon HV30 on HDTV. I edit my videos on MacPro, export as 1920x1080 videos and transfer them to a portable HD that connects through USB to the unit. The quality of videos on 46" Sharp HDTV is just great (the same like directly playing from video camera, just more convenient). I also transferred to the portable HD some HD slideshows I created with Fotomagico - again, excellent quality. Now using Handbrake I am recoding all my old DVD's and then transferring them to the portable HD. Eventually I do not see any need for the DVD player - 500GB HD can store what I need and when I run out of space I can just add another HD. This unit is something I have been waiting for - and the price is right.
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Bones3D said 5:18PM on 11-13-2008
I also bought one during the Best Buy discount last week and have been looking forward to trying it out. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting on a USB drive I ordered days ago to arrive.
In the meanwhile I'm looking into using Handbrake/Perian to handle the DVD conversions. However, I'm curious as to difficult it is to produce decent .MKV containers to store content with commentary/foreign language tracks and subtitles .
Is there anything to be aware of on the Macintosh end when dealing with .MKV?
J said 4:08PM on 11-13-2008
The Xbox 360 plays content from HFS+-formatted drives, too.
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Matt said 5:56PM on 11-13-2008
This unit has gone under the radar and its a real shame. I've had it for a week, and haven't been disappointed in the least. It can play anything except Apple Lossless files, but it does play every MKV file (across many profiles), and every other audio format I've thrown at it. I've played 1080p BD rips, that are somewhere in the neighborhood of 28mbps. It passes through Dolby and DTS. I've never bought a product that worked exactly like it says...except this one It even combines all the files from both hard drives you plug in (there are 2 USB ports). I've decided to sell my AppleTV because im so tired of encoding all my audio in Apple lossless for audio and very specific H.264 files for video. I tried Boxee and every other hack on my AppleTV, and I've tried MediaLink on my PS3, but no hacking on these machines will allow them to play such a variety of media flawlessly. The AppleTV frankly isn't strong enough for REAL Hight Definition files. I've given the AppleTV two years, and frankly, I want my two years back, this unit fills my needs great. I didn't initially care about network capability, but after a week, i do wish I would add files to my hard drive without having to unplug it and plug it into my computer, just to transfer and move it back. This is a very minor issue for such a powerful unit, and at this price.
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Andrew said 4:48PM on 11-13-2008
OMG - thanks for posting this, this is exactly what I have been looking for. FAT32 is great, but limits partitions to 32GB, which is a pain.
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Gimboid said 5:13PM on 11-13-2008
FAT32 can be used on partitions greater that 32GB, you just can't use a Microsoft tool to create them. I used the Seagate Disk Utility (SeaTools) to create a 750GB FAT32 drive.
Iconfactory-Talos said 5:21PM on 11-13-2008
I have a lot of MKV files with subtitle, after few hours of research, I found the best way to handle the subtitle problem is to use MKVtools to extract the subtitle out from mkv, and then use Jubler to covert the subtitle file into .srt.
Make sure both movie and subtitle files both are placed in the same directory, with the same name and their respective extensions.
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SIP said 8:54PM on 11-13-2008
Just what I have been waiting for -- something to play back all those MKV files. Only problem is that you can only do composite or HDMI, no component, no s-video.
I don't own a TV or monitor but connect ti InFocus X1 which has s-video, component or VGA.
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jwilliek said 10:09AM on 11-14-2008
hey guys not trying to nit-pick, but for FAT32, isn't 4GB the maximum individual file size limit instead of 2?
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Lieven Coghe said 4:41AM on 11-15-2008
I have been tempted to buy one of these as well. But the lack of ethernet made me look at other devices.
So I bought a Popcorn Hour instead. It does everything the WD TV does, plus a lot more. It has a 100Mbit ethernet port, which enables you to stream content to it via SMB or NFS.
It can have a hard drive inside (which you have to install yourself, though). With the hard drive inside, you can use the box as a torrent and usenet downloader. This is great! You can have the box downloading at night, and the next day you can watch your favorite tv shows.
The price is right too, in my opinion: 179$
Oh, it supports disks formatted in HFS+ as well ;-)
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Ashaman said 5:16PM on 12-12-2008
Hi everybody!
I need some help with my WD TV - whenever i switch it on I get this message on startup “media library compilation requires more storage space:[3814MB]“? I have an HFS+ drive with 800GB left. It lets me continue on past this point it just comes up with this error unless I turn the media library off. I don’t have journaling enabled and I’ve set all permissions to read & write.
What’s wrong? Any ideas?
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