Western Digital HD Media Player

[K2kevn]

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=572

I picked this up last month and just wanted to let you fan-sub anime watchers about it. It's a pretty cool little box that plays practically everything including ISO's and .mkv If you're tired of watching anime on your computer/PSP then you can use this without having to convert the file to watch it on you HD or non-HD TV. It's a pretty slick little box. Just put the files on a thumb drive or attach an external HD to it and it plays straight from the drive. Me, I just put the files on my PSP and connect has USB drive and it works fine. Some people have had success use a media card reader, but I haven't gotten it to work. They seem pretty good at updating the firmware. Before it would not read the subtitle files in Matroska file but now it does.


BUT since .mkv is just a container and there is no standard for what should the video or audio file format should be, it still has some problems playing some files. For example, it has problems with Eclipse's fan sub of INDEX. It will not read the audio, so I have to watch the .avi version of it (BTW, you CAN tell the difference in video quality between the 2 formats). Also Anime Media's fan sub of Viper's Creed at the strange 576p resolution had problems. For the most part, it has played about 95% of the anime I've put on it.

So I'd recommend it to those who do not have a Media PC setup and who watch fan-subs. I picked it up for $100.

[DualSoul]

Nice! I was looking at this device, but prefer something that can pull files from networked drives. My friend has a Popcorn Hour A100 which does just that. Currently just using a PS3, with a Java based PS3 media server running on the desktop doing the transcoding. I'd be fine with this option, but the program still has issues with certain media files.

[MrDisco]

This box has gone on sale quite often lately. I was tempted to get it, but the lack of an Ethernet jack was a turn-off (and makes little sense to me). Still it's pretty cool for what it can do.

[Syn13]

Using my PS3 for movies and shows I watch. Its unfortunate because of the high resolution, some of the stuff I watch still looks imperfect...Well only tried out some movies that were ripped a while ago and some recent stuff and all the new stuff had to be re-encoded into a format the PS3 can read.

For some reason, from the stuff I've tested(all about the same size), Kamen Rider Decade had jaggies while it was specifically the HD version. Other live-action stuff I had was Honey and Clover which looked amazing on my TV. Anime-wise, Gundam 00 looked best next to Kara no Kyoukai & Ride Back.

[MrDisco]

There's a new firmware release for the WD box for those who have it. I may just end up getting this if it goes on sale later this year.

[balance]

the thing is like mrdisco said no ethernet port is a turn off

Like I have a laptop I can maybe just hook up to tv and will probably do what the wd tv do but for 100 cad it does look attractive

[MrDisco]

however you can buy a usb2ethernet adapter and will little fiddling around you can get it on the network