WD TV HD Media Player

[Antonstef]

I am looking at getting this to show my JPEG photos on my 42" LCD TV.
Is anyone using primarily for that?

I want to be able to take, say 40 shots at a family gathering, download onto my PC, select the good ones, download onto a USB stick, plug it into the WD box, & show the photos on the TV to the waiting audience.

Is that achievable?

Subsequently, I will want to put the best of my photo collection onto a WD Passport (with some sort of folder system) & hopefully be able to quickly show a selection of photos to someone who has just dropped in.

Any advice on how I can achieve 'my dream' would be most welcome.

[Laramie]

I just saw a little on the WD TV Media player. Looks nice. I personally use my ipod for what your describing. I like being able to play music with my slideshow and I already have a cable to connect it to my TV.

I'm sure the WD would do the slideshow just fine. But it might be an expensive way of doing it if you already have an ipod.

[bara03]

I am looking at getting this to show my JPEG photos on my 42" LCD TV.
Is anyone using primarily for that?

I want to be able to take, say 40 shots at a family gathering, download onto my PC, select the good ones, download onto a USB stick, plug it into the WD box, & show the photos on the TV to the waiting audience.

Is that achievable?

Subsequently, I will want to put the best of my photo collection onto a WD Passport (with some sort of folder system) & hopefully be able to quickly show a selection of photos to someone who has just dropped in.

Any advice on how I can achieve 'my dream' would be most welcome.

Yes the WD TV can do this fine, I have one myself and did excatly what you want to do at xmas, it worked fine. It's also good at playing films as well.

[nadtz]

If that WD thing had a network jack Id grab one. Why oh why couldnt they have popped a network interface onto it, having to move HD's back and forth, meh.

[Antonstef]

I have just loaded up some photos on the WD Media Player - not without some difficulty!
I had organised a selection in the order I wanted them shown & made a folder of it. Downloaded into their software - 'Media Converter" [that wasn't very clear in the instructions] & then downloaded it onto a USB drive & then plugged that into the WD Player.
The player then showed them in file No. order!!
I then went back to the folder & renamed all the photos, starting from 01, & tried again. I got the photos showing in the right order!
Anyone know of a better way??

I couldn't download the update that was on the WD site.
The player did not display a 'firmware upgrade icon' referred to in the manual.
Anyone else have this problem?

Apart from that, the photos looked good on the HD LCD, but not any better than they did using the 'Apple TV'. I thought the HD would give even better resolution.

Comments welcome - this is straining my limited technology skills!

[MSIGuy]

You'd be better off with a laptop hooked to the LCD. I had the little WD media player thingie, and it sucked. I took it back that day, and I'm waiting to buy a Popcorn Hour instead.

[bikers1]

For $97 it does more than a gadget costing this little could be expected to.

Plays HD (up to 1080p) movies (er show's yer ipod doing that), slideshows, music

WD have just released a firmware upgrade which resolved most of the little niggles.

I've had one for a month, fantastic, but I'm astonished at the amount of bitching going on about this unit on forums, oh it hasn't got this, that etc, great, if I needed those things I'd spend the other $120 on something that has.

I figure too many people ate all the pies, judging by the utter hardship it seems to be to drag their fat carcasses of the sofa and walk 20 feet to the next room to pick up the external 1Tb drive from the pc to use in the WDTV,

What the hell do people want for $97 FFS !

rant mode=off :D

[bara03]

For $97 it does more than a gadget costing this little could be expected to.

Plays HD (up to 1080p) movies (er show's yer ipod doing that), slideshows, music

WD have just released a firmware upgrade which resolved most of the little niggles.

I've had one for a month, fantastic, but I'm astonished at the amount of bitching going on about this unit on forums, oh it hasn't got this, that etc, great, if I needed those things I'd spend the other $120 on something that has.

I figure too many people ate all the pies, judging by the utter hardship it seems to be to drag their fat carcasses of the sofa and walk 20 feet to the next room to pick up the external 1Tb drive from the pc to use in the WDTV,

What the hell do people want for $97 FFS !

rant mode=off :D

Lol - Couldn't agree more with you, for the £68 I paid for mine, it's a bargain.

[nadtz]

Its definitly a nifty little unit, but having to move a USB drive back and forth is meh. That popcorn hour unit is looking like what I'm talking about, win!

[bikers1]

popcorn hour, IIRC same chipset + network connection, for an extra $100

[Antonstef]

Good to hear from fellow users!
Hey guys - how did you get the player to acknowledge the upgrade?
Mine wont - doesn't matter how I try - on blank USBs, on a Passpost drive.
Any advice??

[bikers1]

My upgrade went very smoothly,

Here's what I did if it helps :)

I took a 1Gb usb stick, blank, freshly formatted (FAT), copied the .ver and .bin file onto the root directory of the stick


powered the wdtv off
inserted stick into side usb port, no other usb devices attached
powered on the wd tv
nav to 'settings'
magically the unit declared 'new firmware found' and showed a new icon, an open folder with a arrow pointing down into it.
selected the above icon (enter)
held my breath
unit rebooted, flashy screen, progress bar appeared, unit rebooted
bob's yer auntie

[Antonstef]

To the Scottish Biker - I tried again - this time it worked!! Thanks.
BUT - I got Version 1.01.02, instead of 1.01.01.
The new version is dated 24.12.08 & resolved only 1 issue - enabling updates with larger drives.
Question - would Version 1.01.01 have been automatically downloaded as part of the new version 02?
Another issue - I primarily bought this unit to do slide show presentations. The shortest 'Interval Time' is 3 seconds, which is what I want on most occasions [if viewers aren't photographers]. BUT at either the 3 seconds setting or the 5 second setting, the photo is displayed at 9 seconds regardless.
Anyone have the same problem?
The photos are @ 3-4 MG, JPEG.

Also - The Player doesn't seem to have a mode to have photos as a screen saver on the TV - any ideas?
Thanks guys.
PS - Its 37 degrees C in Perth WA today!

[Jon]

Firmwares are typically complete rewrites of the entire firmware package, not incremental patches. So you have everything that they've ever changed.

[Antonstef]

I have the WD Player up & running, but the slow slide show interval is still annoying [9 seconds, regardless of whether I set it at 3 or 5 sec].
The photos are @ 3MG each.
I have heard of Faststone Photo Resizer [free!] which I could use to reduce the photos in a batch. Do you think this would help? - if so, to what size [so that the resolution will still be good on a 42" LCD TV.

[Antonstef]

A further update on my progress with my WD Player -
I used "faststone" to reduce the size of my JPEGs.

I chose 50% reduction for the batch, & it reduced them from @ 3 MG each to @ 600 KB [I dont understand the maths, but thats OK]
They looked pretty much as good as the originals on the LCD TV.
The aim was to get them to show at the 3 second interval selection.

The outcome: 5-6 sec at the 3sec setting & @ 6 sec at the 5 sec setting.

At least that is better than what I had before - the display was for 9 sec on either setting.
This was the same whether I used a USB stick or a new WD Passport drive.


I was able to achieve @ 3-4 sec by not going into play mode, but just selecting the 1st photo & then pressing the forward button as soon as that photo showed.
This seems to indicate that the delay is in downloading frm the USB device, through the Player & then onto the TV. The TV is a fairly new Sony HD.

Any thoughts out there??

[buddy4344]

I just saw this device at Best Buy. In the past, I streamed photos via my Tivo, but had mixed quality results - definitely not as nice as on my computer monitor. What is the viewing quality of the images?

[Jon]

Doesn't much matter what size in inches the TV is; the largest HD TV resolution is 1920x1080. Any bigger than that and you're going to be able to zoom in, but won't get any benefit otherwise. A 3 MP file should be between 300KB and 1 MB depending on how much compression you use.

[Antonstef]

Further update -
My LCD TV display resolution is 1920x1080.
Using 'Faststone' I was able to select a resizing of 1620x1080 for the photos. [The previous resizing of 50% gave dimensions a little larger than that].
The outcome was the same as the previous resizing - a showing time of 6 sec when on the 3 sec setting.
A response from WD Support confirmed that scaling may be necessary, & that "Keep to Original' be selected in the settings [which I had done].
The next part didn't make much sense, as the support person's English was not too good -
"Transition Effect at Wide right"
There are 3 Effects to choose from - Normal, Fade, Random.
Normal is the fastest [which I had on].
The support person suggested that 'Normal' might cause some delay as the LCD "is displaying the photo wider"
Is there any contributions others can make?

To Buddy - The photos on my Sony HD 42" LCD are sharp & colourful ['Dynamic']. The visitors are impressed!

To those that know more about this than I -
Although I am very happy with the quality of the picture on the screen - how come when its at 1080 HD with the WD, it doesn't look any better than the 'Apple TV' which displays at 720?