Western Digital TV Live Hub

[Destiny]

Western Digital released a new media player just in time for the 2010 Holidays!

Here is the AnandTech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3990/western-digital-wdtv-live-hub-review

It looks like it comes with a 1TB Hard Drive (A Good one too)!
Supports both Blockbuster and Netflix! Wow!

It also stated it has Gigabit Ethernet - but the reviewer was unable to get gigabit throughput speeds? There was a fiasco a few months ago with Sigma Designs admitting that their current available Sigma Designs 8654/8655/8642/8643 chipsets do not support gigabit ethernet - even with added hardware such as the RealTek gigabit ethernet card. This player has the Sigma Designs 8654 - the exact same chipset as the WDTV Live Plus.

Any owners with their own experience/insight?

 

[CubanlB]

It looks pretty exciting. I just hope they have a model sans hard drive that's $50 less. (or someone gets the UI working on an older unit)

I have a feeling that the low network transfer speeds have more to do with the OS than anything else. If it's running some version of linux the samba settings might need to be adjusted. (Pure guess, I know when I was getting my freenas going this was what was holding back transfer rates)
Or maybe the sigma chip just doesn't have the power to get good throughput, which was the case with my first buffalo nas that was only rocking a 200mhz arm chip but had a GbE nic. It would top out at almost the exact same speeds they are seeing with the WD box.

 

[Modelworks]

The chip cannot do gigabit speeds because of how the internal bus works on the chip. The processor has two cores. One is a DSP that does all the decoding, the other is a general purpose cpu that handles things like reading in the files and moving things in and out the network. During normal playback of a file the cpu usage is about 8% so more than enough free processor to handle sending files over a network so that isn't the problem.

Internally the chip is laid out so the ethernet connects to a bus that also shares traffic with other devices.

The chips were designed with DVR usage in mind and the internal bandwidth to match that. Nothing a DVR does exceeds 100Mbit speeds so internally there was no need for anything more. The chip has pci, satax2, usbx2, i2c, ethernet support and those interfaces run at full speed, but they all connect into a bus system that cannot support the full speed of the interface type. Think of it like having a network interface, portable hard drive, usb memory drive, all on one USB port. You might have a USB to sata adapter connected but don't expect the USB connection to handle 150MB/second.


The chips have more than enough power to do what they do. They only use about 8-10% of the cpu power when playing back files and that is why people are able to use torrents, usenet, ftp servers , etc in the background while still playing back files without any change in playback.

 

[Destiny]

The chip cannot do gigabit speeds because of how the internal bus works on the chip. The processor has two cores. One is a DSP that does all the decoding, the other is a general purpose cpu that handles things like reading in the files and moving things in and out the network. During normal playback of a file the cpu usage is about 8% so more than enough free processor to handle sending files over a network so that isn't the problem.

Internally the chip is laid out so the ethernet connects to a bus that also shares traffic with other devices.

The chips were designed with DVR usage in mind and the internal bandwidth to match that. Nothing a DVR does exceeds 100Mbit speeds so internally there was no need for anything more. The chip has pci, satax2, usbx2, i2c, ethernet support and those interfaces run at full speed, but they all connect into a bus system that cannot support the full speed of the interface type. Think of it like having a network interface, portable hard drive, usb memory drive, all on one USB port. You might have a USB to sata adapter connected but don't expect the USB connection to handle 150MB/second.


The chips have more than enough power to do what they do. They only use about 8-10% of the cpu power when playing back files and that is why people are able to use torrents, usenet, ftp servers , etc in the background while still playing back files without any change in playback.

Thank's for clarifying... I was hoping you would respond to this thread... you know your stuff!

I did some digging and apparently they used a new Sigma SDK to try to enable Gigabit support and HDMI 1.4 support with this chipset... but apparently the reviewer could not get Gigabit throughput speeds so it may just proved what Modelworks stated...:thumbsup:

 

[Destiny]

It looks pretty exciting. I just hope they have a model sans hard drive that's $50 less. (or someone gets the UI working on an older unit)

I have a feeling that the low network transfer speeds have more to do with the OS than anything else. If it's running some version of linux the samba settings might need to be adjusted. (Pure guess, I know when I was getting my freenas going this was what was holding back transfer rates)
Or maybe the sigma chip just doesn't have the power to get good throughput, which was the case with my first buffalo nas that was only rocking a 200mhz arm chip but had a GbE nic. It would top out at almost the exact same speeds they are seeing with the WD box.

You are correct about that too... lately media players have been having network shares/SAMBA Issues with Windows 7... particularily if one of the Laptops or PC devices connected to the home router have Windows Live Sign on Assistant activated - I discovered that issue when I built my new Windows PC last month and connected to my home router... It is a known issue with Linux and SAMBA... once I disabled/uninstalled the Windows Live Sign On Assistant everything was working again...