Western Digital WDTV media jukebox

Play computer video files on your television

Western Digital's WDTV is a media player, but it's what you might called a bare-bones system in that the user almost has to build it up themselves.

Unlike with a media streamer the WDTV has no network access and unlike other players we've seen there's no internal hard disk. Instead you must connect external storage – in the form of a USB memory key or an external hard disk – to one of the two USB sockets on the device. There’s also an HDMI output for connecting it to a high-definition television, a digital audio output and a composite output for conventional televisions. All this is on a device that’s pretty compact, if a little uninspiring in design.

Digital music, video or photos on a disk you plug in are automatically filtered and shown in corresponding categories (such as music, video, and so on) on the main display, shown on the TV screen. We were very impressed by how responsive this was and in the control it offered over media, which can be searched by folder, date, or using tags such as artist names or album titles. There’s a choice of thumbnail or list views and a nice degree of control over playback order, slideshow transitions for photos and media management.

We were particularly impressed by the wide range of format support for files. It can handle all the latest standards including HD content up to the highest quality levels, and it struggled to play few of the wide range of files we tested. These were loaded quickly and the player was very responsive during playback, making it easy to skip back and forth, pause and resume without buffering or delay.

Quality was good across the board, context-sensitive menus offer zoom controls, subtitle support, audio track and repeat controls and large collections can be filtered with search criteria to make them easy to browse.

This really is an impressive effort from Western Digital, in a marketplace that hasn’t really been cracked by a decent player so far. It trumps most alter natives that offer wireless access or internal storage in terms of format support and usability and if you’re not worried about the lack of these features it’s a very attractive way to view a media collection for beginners and advanced users alike.