Quick Lineup of 3 HD Media Players
Recently I have been trying to find a good solution to dealing with the piles of media I have sitting around. There are 3 players that seemed pretty darn good so I got them and put them through a few paces.
Let me preface most of this by saying that this device is meant to read off a network storage device (I have an HP windows home server) and play through HDMI to my home theater. Music would be nice but my primary usage for this is video. Let’s get on with it, shall we?
And now the remotes…
The asus one is the easiest to deal with, and the WD one is so damned tiny, all the buttons feel the same. It’s like they meant for this to be hooked up with the Harmony remote. Yes, that will be happening soon, my friends.
Let’s look at the Asus box opened up…
Not bad. All the devices basically look the same when the box gets opened. Nothing super fancy here but I am not really bothered with that.
Here is the WD box opened:
And now the Seagate:
Let’s move on to the interfaces and usability of the units…
The Asus interface is the cheapest and boy does it show. The interface is straight from 1982. It’s ugly in ways that I could not think about. It has a ridiculous method of telling me the connection speed to the server. I did not get a photo of that because I was so baffled that it was even there. There are no thumbnails of any media and dealing with audio is a pain in the ass. Connecting to a network is simple enough after you set your username and password to the network share. Once it’s set, you can use it easily through shortcuts. Video and audio quality are excellent with this unit. It handed a large mkv file with zero problems including a full digital sound track.
Next up… Seagate…
This interface is much better visually. However it has odd problems dealing with how you connect to the network shares. You have to drill down several steps and it’s a bit of a bother. Honestly, I need to spend a bit more time with this unit. Apart from a better polished UI and more responsiveness, this is very similar to the Asus.
Ok, last but not least, the WD TV Live.
I had some initial problems setting this up. I use an Onkyo Receiver to switch HDMI inputs and initially the resolution gave it fits. I switched over to another cable and went at 720p @ 60hz. That’s the res of my TV right now so there ya go. The TV can take and downsample the 1080 signal but the way the Onkyo deals with it does something strange. That was an exciting 20 minutes of troubleshooting. Ha!
This is a very nice unit. Automatic thumbnailing of audio files (even networked ones) is wonderful. It would be great if it did the same thing for video files. That would make it a perfect setup. Audio was nicely supported with Pandora. Worked like a charm! Awesome!
Conclusions
If you need a zero frills unit the Asus is the cheapest. You will know you spent the least amount of money possible. However, the unit I would go with is the WD TV Live. The audio setup combined with the nice video setup are really solid. Additionally, there is a crazy bastard “b-rad” that is already working on hacking the unit! Color me in for the hacks. It looks like a pretty nice featured unit under the hood.