Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Great but very unresponsive
Comment: I bought one of these to play movies from my HDD on the bedroom TV. It looks great, connectivity is good as I wasn't worried about there being no HDMI as I wasn't going to be using it on an HD TV. The menu is simple and easy to navigate and everything is very straightforward. Playback quality is also very good and I am pretty happy with my purchase. However, there are a few niggles. No MKV support is a pain as I have quite a few standard definition MKV files and these wont play. But the main frustration with this unit is the responsiveness of it... or to be exact, the lack of it. It may be my setup, but I am using a WD 1TB HDD with it and thought there shouldn't be any problems with it. When I first tried out the unit, I thought the supplied batteries were duds (actually, after testing them, they weren't far from it!). I bought brand new batteries and still found problems with menus sticking, movies not starting when pressing play and most commonly, button presses not being recognised when a movie is playing. It can take quite a number of button presses for it to finally register. I have a small 20gb drive, and I'll test it on the WD Mini to see if it's the sheer amount of files on the 1TB drive that is a problem. I also tried upgrading to the latest firmware and resetting the WD Mini and nothing has solved the problem. It seems to be a common enough problem and have seen numerous post on newsgroups, but no solution or reason. Like I said earlier, it's a great wee machine, but the lack of MKV support and the unresponsivness are major drawbacks. So much so, that I might even consider buying a similar product but from a different manufacturer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: mini media player
Comment: After a bit of mucking about with cables, found instructions were'nt clear about the need to use both sets of cables but got there in the end and it works well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great little player, if you can live with its limitations
Comment: I bought this to play DVD rips and .mp4 .mv4 files that I have used on Ipod touch and ipad.
First the good news: for AVI and Divx files it works a treat, provided you have not ripped to a resolution greater than 720p (as per the spec). The remote and the interface are very simple to use and intuitive, and of course it is remarkably good value and well built for the price.
Now the bad news: I couldn't get it to play any of my .mp4 files, in spite of the spec which says that mpeg 4 is supported. Also, some of the .avi files which I had ripped from standard dvd and which I thought were 720p, would not play either. When I did get it to work, the quality of the image using composite video connection was very good.
Sadly, due to the lack of support for most of my video library (which is .mp4)I had to return it. I suppose I could have switched all of my .mp4s to avi format, but life is too short!
So in summary, it is a good buy provided you intend to rip your dvds to .avi at no more than 720p
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good basic player. Cannot play some format
Comment: This is a good basic player but has trouble playing some formats like mp4 and mkv. Cannot pause, fast forward certain files.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Mini in size but HUGE on delivery!
Comment: The Western Digital TV HD 1080i Mini Media Player is by far one of the best bits of tech i own. I found it by pure coincidence in a large electrical store and after the demonstration totally taken aback by its power to play 1080i HD quality...a couple of clicks on Amazon and now I own one!
Before hand I was using my 2tb external Seagate hard-drive connected to my HP laptop and running the lot through an S-Video output to the TV and an audio to my surround sound. This fantastic piece of kit not only removes the need for the laptop but its playback and clever gadgetry inside the machine means it automatically scales up the playback to HD quality. Honestly you won't be disappointed with this product - it does exactly what it says on the tin...its menu system is faultless, not to mention that when you turn off the system is also quickly shuts down the hard-drive so its kinda eco-friendly too!
I've recommended this piece of kit to a couple of people at work and they can vouch the same - so WELL DONE Western Digital on simply a piece of tech that doesn't pretend to do anything less than what it can ACTUALLY deliver! Buy one, you won't be disappointed.
Mini in size but HUGE on delivery!
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