Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Excellent Product - after the setup heebeegeebies
Comment: For those amongst you who have Windows 7 Home Premium, some of you may well have the same problems as I did. Physically connecting up the Media Player is a doddle. As recommended by another poster the 1st thing to do is to upgrade to the latest software version. The player can now access the internet and see your network - all appears well until you try to view your media. At this point the Media Player requires a login and password. And I could not do anything to get past this problem.
An excellent website forum is http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Media-Player/ct-p/wdtvlive where you can get a great deal of help - from people it must be said with a wide variety of 'foolproof' solutions. However they all appear to be trying to help those of us who are less capable.
The solution that worked for me was to go into Control Panel, Programs and remove all programs with 'Live Update' in them. These seem to all be microsoft programs. After that all was well. 4 points only as I think WD should have identified this problem by now and indicated a recommended solution. Without the forums I would never have found a solution.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Avoid!
Comment: I fought with this media player for over 2 months. I have now admitted defeat and returned it to Amazon(great service-took it back immediately).
Before anyone buys it I would strongly suggest they read the western digital forums to see what kind of problems large amounts of people are encountering.
Networking- network shares are only picked up by the WDTV intermittently. Sometimes it sees them, other times nothing. It only seems to work over network using a 3rd party media server(TVersity, etc). Even with this it is highly temperamental. HD movies in particular start off OK then slow down/freeze after 5 minutes. This seem to be a very common problem according to forums.
Eventually I resorted to USB connection and this worked OK at first. After about 3 weeks the player started taking up to 5 minutes to find an individual music file. Final straw-sent it back
I would recommend this item to anyone with a lot of time on their hands and who handles frustration well
Customer Rating:
Summary: Missing key features and functionality
Comment: I was very disappointed with many aspects of the usability of this product.
To start with the positives, the form factor is nice, and the box includes a bunch of unnecessary cables (for an HD product) ... I can't think of any more positives.
For the negatives, there are lots of basics wrong:
- No HDMI or Ethernet cables provided. Yes the box is cheap, but this is not a good start. It does include analogue video cables though.
- Automatic IP address allocation (DHCP) is very flaky. It seems that the timings are off because it worked when connected to one type of router, but not another (where all other products have no issues). I found this reported on various forums after discovering the problem myself. The cause remains unclear.
- The navigation through the menus is simply ugly as sin.
- Using the text entry field for youtube searches (for example) is really painful.
- The biggest problem is that it has no concept of DVD structure. While it can play DVD .vob files from a network server, it treats them a single flat files. It doesn't understand DVD menus or chapters. It does allow for language and subtitle changes, but that's all. If you want to play DVD's from a server, this is not the product for you.
Apparently the newly released (only in the US for now at least) $120 "WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player" does support DVD menus. I'll have to wait and see how this really works before trying a Western Digital product again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: User interface could be more friendly
Comment: This unit does well on the essential, i.e. it plays movie files well (AVIs, etc.), but has a few annoying quirks or just downright bad design.
The on-screen interface (in a "cross" formation) is a bit gimmicky, and could be simpler and more user-friendly. For example, after watching a movie file there's no easy simple way to immediately delete it. You have to go though a tedious series of steps to navigate to the File Management part of the system, and delete it there, which is annoying.
I find that on startup there's only maybe a 50/50 chance it recognises a USB drive is attached, and I end up having to shutdown, unplug the drive, plug it in again and restart (and cross my fingers).
When a movie is paused, you can't fast forward or rewind! You first have to un-pause it, then fast forward/rewind.
The unit is a lot smaller than you might imagine from the photos, and the remote control is similarly tiny. Also, the on-screen text is on the small side. Those with poor eyesight, or a small TV, may struggle to read it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, but don't buy for Youtube music vids
Comment: I won't add to what others have written on the general setup and function of this device. As others have already said I found it easy to set up and use.
HOWEVER: I specifically bought this as an MTV-Replacement. I was really looking forward to being able to stream my favourite music vids from Youtube onto my tv. I set it up, went straight to Youtube, typed in "Lady Gaga" as the first search and was really pleased to see all her recent hits at the top of the search list.
But it won't play any of them. Not the fault of the device: Every official video that I selected returned an error message saying something like "Can't play because the owner of this material has restricted it from being streamed to TVs" (or something similar).
So I'm going to keep it but I probably won't use it much because all the content that I really want to watch on Youtube has been specifically withheld from devices like this.
Again, I should stress, not the fault of this little device, Western Digital or anyone else. Just the way Youtube works.
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