Western Digital WD TV Live
Tiny Media Centre for Use With TV - Internet capable
The WD TV Live is a discrete box that you plug in to your tv that allows you to view video and photo media on your TV away from the computer. Just plug in a USB media source (USB hard drive or USB Memory Stick) and watch on your TV using the compact remote control included in the box.
The LIVE part of this media player separates it from the old version of the WD TV as it can now accept streaming video content through a network or over an Internet connection. Capability to work with Youtube and other online video services is included, also BBC iPlayer compatibility should be available in the future - requiring a firmware update from the manufacturers website.
With the YouTube and should iPlayer compatibility come sooner rather than later this is a must to compliment a freeview enabled TV in order to give a rich compact media experience, with a little popping to the PC to rip DVDs and full quality blu ray movies into a convenient and accessible media library
Key Feature List
• Play Full HD 1080p video, music and photos on your HD TV
• DTS Downmix - Convert your DTS Audio to play as normal stereo
• Supports widest variety of file formats and devices
• Network capable for easy access to the newest content from PCs, network drives, internet favorites
Compatible With:
HDMI, Full HD (1080p), AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1),TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1) MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9. Photo formats - JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG. Music formats - MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS & DTS Downmix, USB 2.0, H.264, SimplayHD™, Energy Star®, Dolby Digital, DTS, DLNA, Bonjour, AVCHD, Windows Vista
Buffalo 500GB DriveStation USB External harddrive
500GB of fast access, secure files from Buffalo (Design may vary)
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A fantastic external storage option. Compatable with Windows XP, Vista and Mac Os this is a FAST plug and play USB device. The device is bundled with Buffalo Secure LockWare, auto back-up software and claims to save 75% of the power used by other external hard drives. Using TURBOUSB the device allows for much faster file transfer that other similar devices. The 500GB external drive is fantastic and can store 60 hours of HD video or 200 hours of DVD quality video, or over 120 thousand MP3 or photo files. That is a lot of storage at such a small price!
If you are into your movies you may find that your DVD player may be able to play files from a USB device, in which case one of these can be a fantastic way to reduce the clutter of DVDs / Blu Rays. Just encode your DVDs into a format compatable with your player and transfer to the drive, you can have around 100 movies on here all accessabile with a click of your remote. The only pain will be encoding the DVDs - but when you are done you wont have to worry about scratched discs ever again.
What else can you say for a storage device. The one thing this lacks (though not too much for the price) is a network (either ethernet or wireless) compatability. But for the home user this little package really packs a punch
