WD TV Live Plus: Western Digital's Latest Media Player Reviewed

Our piece on media streamer platforms indicated that we were in the process of assembling a test suite of media files. With the help of feedback from readers and some members from AVSForums, we managed to assemble a set of 44 test files covering various media streamer / HTPC scenarios for v1.0.0 of the AnandTech Media Streamer Test Suite. Weights have been assigned to each stream based on how frequently one might encounter them in a home theater setting. The table below indicates the various aspects tested by each file, the assigned weight for the stream, and the score obtained by the WD TV Live Plus depending on the success it had with playback.

The WD TV Live Plus has some drawbacks when it comes to media compatibility, especially compared to an HTPC system which due to its flexible software options which lets it play virtually anything. (For instance the ASRock Core100HT-BD HTPC scored 336 out of 344 in our media compatibility test suite). The WD TV Live Plus acheives a score of 200 out of 344 here (58.14%). Some of the key shortcomings in media compatibility include failure to decode WMAPro audio codecs and RMVB, poor deinterlacing capabilities, some subtitles problems and a few issues with choppiness on certain test files.

While the device does have full WMV support, it does not have support for WMApro audio codecs. Several of our WMV test files played perfectly but without audio; including a de-facto WMV-HD test file from the WMV showcase website. There are many users who do not utilize any windows media codecs in any shape or form and so this will not bother many people. However, this could mean major compatibility issues with users who have previously encoded much of their video content to WMV for Xbox media streaming purposes. RMVB is not listed as a supported format and indeed the rmvb files do not even show up in the folder when browsing through the content. Deinterlacing performance on the WD TV Live was sub-par and most of the deinterlacing test videos had flickering issues. A drastic improvement was seen when offloading the deinterlacing to my HDTV's deinterlacing processor by setting the WD TV Live to 1080i and allowing the television itself to interpolate the fields. If you are going to be using the WD TV Live for watching interlaced content, you might do yourself a service to do the same.

The WD TV Live does support subtitles and has a wide range of language/region options. The SSA subs worked fine on most content, but some of the stylized subs were not visible on our test file. PGS subtitles did not play from MKVs. Also, some languages that read right to left were displayed incorrectly. Other lost points in this test suite came from a few test files that had choppiness issues such as some of the HD camera clips and a Panasonic demo reel.

Blu-ray menus are not supported at all, but the device does ask if you would like to play the video within the ISO, and it is possible to view the video stream inside the ISO. This worked on our test Blu-ray ISO that only included one video stream, but when attempting to do the same with our HQV Blu-ray ISO, it resulted in only one video being played, although there were several video streams inside. Most likely, the WD TV attempts to play the largest video stream and that is all. Some points were docked for this issue.

With the incompatibilities and other issues noted, the WD TV Live Plus does support a wide range of files and plays them very well. With a few exceptions, the content that the WD TV Live advertises as being compatible with plays smoothly even at high bit-rates and full 1080p resolutions. Dolby TrueHD is supported, although only in the mt2s container (strangely, this is not listed in the manual as supported). DVD ISO playback seems flawless including full menu support. Even Blu-ray ISO files work on the device, with certain quirks, as mentioned above.

[UPDATE]

Due to reader feedback, we have added an additional test to the benchmark suite to determine if the player is capable of playing extracted Blu-Ray and DVD ISO formats. The WD TV Live Plus was capable of playing the DVD with menus just fine after clicking the first file in the Video_TS folder. The extracted Blu-ray ISO could be played one video stream at a time by navigating into the folder structure of the extracted ISO, no Blu-Ray menus were available. Please note the updated scores.