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

Multimedia enthusiasts are often concerned about the quality of pictures output by the system. While this is a very subjective metric, we have decided to take as much of an objective approach as possible. Starting this month, we will be evaluating all our HTPCs and media streamers with the HQV 2.0 test suite. This test suite consists of 39 different streams divided into 4 different classes. The playback device is assigned scores for each, depending on how well it plays the stream. Each test was repeated multiple times to ensure that the correct score was assigned. The scoring details are available in the testing guide [PDF]. In the table below, we indicate the maximum score possible for each test, and how much the WD TV Live Plus is able to score.

The WD TV Live scores only a 43 out of 210 on the HQV 2.0 test. The image quality tests show that the device had particular issues with deinterlacing and noise reduction. In particular the video resolution tests showed a large amount of flickering when displaying the test videos. No noise reduction appeared to be occuring, cadence was an issue, but the picture did seem to be quite vivid and not dull.

As a side note; If you are using this device to watch interlaced content on a high definition television with a quality image processor, there is a way to improve your picture quality by bypassing WD's image processor. By setting the WD TV to 1080i output rather than 1080p, you can effectively utilize the video processor of the television to provide a much cleaner picture than the WD TV Live is capable of producing on its own 1080p setting. Of course this depends on the quality of your television; but on the 52" Samsung television used in testing, great improvement was observed when viewing deinterlaced content using this method.  

The picture quality on this device proves to be significantly less than the HTPC counterparts that we have seen thus far. We will be comparing these HQV benchmark results with those obtained by similar devices in the near future.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Sigma Designs processor used in the unit has hardware support for specific noise reduction and deinterlacing algorithms. Unfortunately, WD doesn't seem to have enabled these blocks in the firmware.