3 choices of media players

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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
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they all suck. that's a commonality. but you want that right? super low brag power? 6watt to drive that 500 watt amp and 200 watt plasma?

get a used pc - throw it in an antec micro fusion - it prob will cost less than $300 and have win7 and a remote
 
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velillen

Platinum Member
Jul 12, 2006
2,120
1
81
Emulex said:
they all suck. that's a commonality. but you want that right? super low brag power? 6watt to drive that 500 watt amp and 200 watt plasma?

get a used pc - throw it in an antec micro fusion - it prob will cost less than $300 and have win7 and a remote
Click to expand...

yes they suck so much yet so many people recommend them. Guess people like recommending crap products Oo



The first and last ones you linked are more or less the same. The first one was the first WDTV and the other is the "refresh" that came out a year later to replace it. Basically the same feauters but the new ones is a bit smoother and performs a bit better IMO. I have both and dont notice much of a difference.

The middle one (the LIVE) is networkable. So you can stream media to it via other computers. You can also have it stream content from the internet. Functionality wise they all do the same things...play media. For the price i would go with the LIVE personally.

If youw ant you can also look into third party firmware which adds support for dvd drives and other features as well.
 
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Tsuwamono

Senior member
Mar 17, 2006
592
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Emulex said:
they all suck. that's a commonality. but you want that right? super low brag power? 6watt to drive that 500 watt amp and 200 watt plasma?

get a used pc - throw it in an antec micro fusion - it prob will cost less than $300 and have win7 and a remote
Click to expand...

If someone gives you 3 choices all plus or minus 10$ of the 100$ mark... why would you recommend a 300$ PC? I don't want a Win7 PC, thats why I'm looking at these.

velillen said:
The middle one (the LIVE) is networkable. So you can stream media to it via other computers. You can also have it stream content from the internet. Functionality wise they all do the same things...play media. For the price i would go with the LIVE personally.

If youw ant you can also look into third party firmware which adds support for dvd drives and other features as well.
Click to expand...

Awesome, I'll go with the Live then. I was staring at them for 30 minutes and couldnt figure out what was different. lol.
 
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de8212

Diamond Member
Jan 2, 2000
4,021
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I have the WD Live. Paid ~100 for it not long after it came out and it's worht every penny. Definately does not suck IMO.


I also have an external drive connected to it that I copy files over to from my Win7 pc. I can stream files directly to the WD from my PC as well. Works great.
 
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Shadowknight

Diamond Member
May 4, 2001
3,959
3
81
WD Live chokes on some content for me... I tend to rip and re-encode blu-rays to as close to 100% of the original quality as possible, but sometimes the 100mb NIC can't handle that much data. If you're looking to rip your blu-rays and stream over the network, I'd keep an eye out for players that support gigabit speeds.
 
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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
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71
oh yes i forgot some people are cool with 720p with a few frame drops. i prefer my 1080p to not drop frames, nor the 120hz sequential 3D 1080p.

but if you are cool with frame drops/stutters go for it. I guess the intent of quality wasn't mentioned. I didn't spend $1500 on a nice 3D plasma to watch content at substandard quality when i feed it
 
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velillen

Platinum Member
Jul 12, 2006
2,120
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81
Funny how both of mine have never had any of the issues you have had. Both have played 1080p at 60fps just fine (soccer games mostly) and 1080p24 and 1080p29fps (movies encoded ~10-15mbps all encoded with x264) just fine without studdering/dropped frames. Even the anandtech review seems to support this a smost of the files it "failed" on just arent supported. Or have issues such as DTS-MA audio only being DTS which resulted in a lower score.

Only issue i have had wasnt even WD's fault but with the headers from an old version of mkvmerge when i remuxed my audio. Well that and lack of DTS-MA support :)

No comment on the 3d but i didnt even know they supported it!

All that is played off a WD passport though. Streaming wise might cause it to have issues. So if you stream your experience most definitely could be different.

Guess my experience has been much different than yours though. I've yet to run into files the WDTV couldnt handle other than issues caused by other programs (mkvmerge) so to each his own!
 
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angry hampster

Diamond Member
Dec 15, 2007
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www.lexaphoto.com
Emulex said:
oh yes i forgot some people are cool with 720p with a few frame drops. i prefer my 1080p to not drop frames, nor the 120hz sequential 3D 1080p.

but if you are cool with frame drops/stutters go for it. I guess the intent of quality wasn't mentioned. I didn't spend $1500 on a nice 3D plasma to watch content at substandard quality when i feed it
Click to expand...

Are you this pretentious about everything? ...or is it just home theatre gimmicks?
 
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Tsuwamono

Senior member
Mar 17, 2006
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Modelworks

Modelworks

Lifer
Feb 22, 2007
16,240
7
76
Emulex said:
oh yes i forgot some people are cool with 720p with a few frame drops. i prefer my 1080p to not drop frames, nor the 120hz sequential 3D 1080p.

but if you are cool with frame drops/stutters go for it. I guess the intent of quality wasn't mentioned. I didn't spend $1500 on a nice 3D plasma to watch content at substandard quality when i feed it
Click to expand...

You know not of what you speak.
The chip in the live is the sigma designs 865x product. That chip can decode video as fast or faster than your pc. The chip was designed for use in DVR and has 2 independent pipelines for decoding video . The reason for that is because of the need to watch one channel while recording another. The internal DSP chip does all the decoding in hardware. The cpu on these boxes spends most of its time doing nothing during the playback of video. It reads data and sends it to the DSP which uses about 10-20% of its capacity.

To say it drops frames and stutters or has substandard quality is BS. Every instance of poor performance with industry standard files has been linked back to user error.
 
Modelworks

Modelworks

Lifer
Feb 22, 2007
16,240
7
76
Shadowknight said:
WD Live chokes on some content for me... I tend to rip and re-encode blu-rays to as close to 100% of the original quality as possible, but sometimes the 100mb NIC can't handle that much data. If you're looking to rip your blu-rays and stream over the network, I'd keep an eye out for players that support gigabit speeds.
Click to expand...

You need to look at your network. 100Mbit is over twice what a blu-ray disc requires. The live has a buffer on network content that can hold 64MByte of data before it will pause to buffer new content. That may not seem like a lot but with blu-ray data rates at 5.6Mbytes/sec that is enough to store 10 seconds of playback before it would run out of data and need to wait.
 
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