WD TV LIVE HUB TWONKY PC
WD TV LIVE HUB TWONKY PLUS

But for AU$300 it's an excellent option.Īdditionally, you can 'play to' the Hub from a Windows 7 PC or other compliant DLNA device. Of course, it can't replace a dedicated NAS, as it's only a single drive (which means no redundancy in the case of drive failure) and the drive isn't user replaceable. It will map the device to a drive letter on your PC and you can quickly drag files to and from it. Using the bundled WD Discovery Tool you can set the Live Hub up on your network to act as a NAS. Facebook integration is as good as you can expect it to be on your television, though you can connect a USB keyboard for quick text entry. The YouTube interface is friendly and mimics the left-to-right mechanic of the rest of the player and playback is swift. It was a matter of hit and miss then to click on each file to see if it would work or not very time consuming.

While it supposedly covers most files, we found that when clicking on a video it wouldn't play it. It would be better if it could let you change the artist and album names independently.Īnother more important problem we encountered was that the Hub doesn't list the video file type in the video browser. While the device let us attach the band name, it couldn't find the album in its online database and then simply failed. Even so, we had problems trying to rename a WAV collection from the newest Superchunk album Majesty Shredding. The WD does give you the option of renaming your files if it gets it wrong, as long as the files are on the drive itself - they can't be on a network server. Initially believing the WD didn't support the file format at all, we discovered about 100 WAV files quite by accident when we were browsing through the C's - it had placed them all under Charlton Heston! Changing this to 'Digital Passthrough on HDMI gave us back Dolby Digital.Īs a humorous aside, while the player supports WAV files, we found it doesn't particularly know what to do with them.

Initial testing with 5.1-channel material was presented in stereo but on further investigation we found that surround was set in the audio menu to 'Stereo' by default. Connecting up the digital HDMI output to the Pioneer VSX-1020 receiver was able to deliver a touch of refinement, and WD suggests hooking the Hub digitally to take advantage of files with surround sound encoding. That said, playback quality was generally excellent, and we never experienced any stutters even over a 100-megabit connection.Īudio quality was actually quite good via the analog outs, with plenty of low-end heft and treble detail. There are no fancy DACs or image processors here - the WD TV Live Hub simply plays back the files you have.

WD TV LIVE HUB TWONKY PLUS

Missing are Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless, plus DRM purchases from the iTunes store (protected AAC) or similar.Īs a budget media streamer we didn't expect much in terms of performance. You also get MP3, WAV and AAC on the audio side, DivX, MPEG-1/2/4 and MOV on the video side and JPEG, GIF, TIFF for the picture part. Unlike pretenders such as the Apple TV, the WD supports a lot of different files, including most notably lossless FLAC and high-def format MKV. Some devices only allow one name at a time, which is quite laborious. There's no acceleration as such, but the WD allows you to skip through 16 names at a time. It's perhaps the most friendly we've seen on any media player and makes it quick to browse through your entire media collection.

The other significant change singular to the Hub is the development of a new interface. In addition, you can plug your external hard drives into it and use it to centralise all of your media. The WD TV Live Hub is the most advanced media streamer we've seen yet: it incorporates a 1TB hard drive, and is designed to replace a separate storage device or NAS.

Wd tv live hub twonky