Western Digital Introduces New WD TV Live Streaming Media Player with Spotify in Tow

Western Digital jumped on to the local media streaming bandwagon quite early in the game. With better codec compatibility and a more stable platform compared to other vendors, the WDTV lineup caught the imagination of the consumers. Over the last few years (coinciding with the rise of Netflix), US consumers have tended to prefer over the top streaming solutions. Recognizing this trend, Western Digital has been strengthening their media streamers portfolio with the appropriate features.

Today, Western Digital is introducing the latest addition to their WDTV lineup, the new WD TV Live Streaming Media Player. Its roots (in terms of both hardware and firmware) seem to lie in the WDTV Live Hub which received praise from us last year. The industrial design has been updated, and the main hardware addition seems to be the integrated wireless network capability. The internal hard drive has been removed. Local media streaming compatibility seems to be retained.

Like the Roku 2 XS, the new WD TV Live has support for single band (2.4 GHz) 802.11n wireless only. However, the network port is Gigabit. Also, Western Digital PR claims that the new WD TV Live (as well as the WDTV Live Hub) supports 1080p video along with Dolby Digital Plus audio for selected Netflix titles. This is something we hope to evaluate and report back soon.

The new premium service making an appearance in the WD TV Live (as well as the Hub) is Spotify. As the PR reproduced below shows, the unit offers the full Spotify experience including account management and the social features (such as sending songs to your friend's inbox). In addition to YouTube, the new media player (as well as the WDTV Live Hub) gains access to DailyMotion, a service quite popular in Europe. The last few firmware releases for the WDTV Live Hub have also brought some simple games like Sudoku and Texas Hold'Em.

Priced at $99.99, this unit seems to cover all the media streaming aspects missed by the Roku 2 XS. It probably doesn't have the fan following of the Roku or the developer support that Roku provides. We also don't have much hope of it solving the DTS-HD MA bitstreaming issue. However, for the general consumer, Western Digital seems to have lined up a winner at a sweet price point (they could have chosen a better name, considering that the WD TV Live was the name given to the second generation player in the WDTV family). Stay tuned for our review of the new WD TV Live Streaming Media Player.

Press Release [DOCX]

Product Brief [PDF]

 

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Review: Sky Player on Xbox 360

All hail the Sky Player for Xbox. As well as being a video-on-demand system online, Sky Player has been streaming live channels for over a year to PC users, and Sky Player for Xbox tries to replicate that experience on a games console.

It's a nice idea – and it effortlessly makes the best possible use of the Xbox 360's luscious new interface to create a service that's lots of fun to use.

It's expensive to non-Sky subscribers though and certainly a niche product in the mass market, but for Sky converts it's essentially a VoD solution for the home (or a second home) that beats Sky Anytime hands-down.

The look and feel of the interface is stunning. 'Xboxy' is the only way to describe it; sweeping between the icons for live channels, VoD content and movie listings is familiar and effortless.

There's no way to personalise the service and it doesn't make recommendations about content it might think you like, but it's so easy to use and the on-screen menus are mostly lightning quick.

Most Xboxy of all the features is Party mode, which only works with live TV channels.

The screen shows your avatar watching a huge TV screen, which fills most of the space. Send invites to your friends and if they accept, their avatars appear next to yours, and interact using an E-mote; a small dial appears on the screen and you can play your avatar like a puppet, making him shout at the screen or clap ferociously.

Back to the serious stuff. Scroll to live TV and you'll find a thumbnail playing the last live channel you visited (with sound) alongside a stack of other channels and a TV guide, though it only gives listings for the next 48 hours and can't handle reminders.

In terms of content, Sky Player is an exact copy of the online version, but unless you already have access to (or stump up the cash for) the Entertainment or Sky Sports packages, it's not much to get excited about.

The 16 free live channels comprise GOLD, Sky Real Lives, Sky Arts 1, MTV, Sky Sports News, Eurosport UK, Sky News, Nat Geo, Nat Geo Wild, History, Eden, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Nick Jr.

Add an Entertainment Pack and you'll receive both the Sky Screen channels, which show the latest blockbusters on a loop – though that does seem decidedly old fashioned in the age of VoD.

Buy a Sky Sports Pack and you'll get Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2, Sky Sports 3, Sky Sports Xtra, ESPN and ESPN Classic.

The movie VoD section is excellent and surely the backbone of Sky Player's appeal. Stuffed with 421 movies (to be exact), you can browse via A-Z, genre, latest additions or most popular.

Choose one and you get a synopsis and information on the length, file size (for a future download service perhaps?) and, best of all, a list of related films, which makes navigation even easier.

Aside from movies, there are repeats from Sky Sports, and a mix or free and paid documentaries from Sky, Nat Geo and the History Channel (at £0.98 an episode).

Some material – and occasionally, the interface as a whole – can be slow to load. Once it's playing, you can call up a FF/RW/pause control and speed through content at 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x speeds.

We used the service on a 2Mpbs broadband line and the service struggled, buffering constantly, though upped to 6Mbps it worked without a hitch. If you do struggle, medium and low quality settings are available, but picture quality is very poor.

The advice is clear; don't think about getting Sky Player on Xbox unless you always have upwards of 2Mbps.

What you'll actually be able to watch on Sky Player depends on your regular Sky subscription.

If you already subscribe to the Sky Sports package via the satellite service, you can watch those same channels on your Xbox360 for free, wherever it's used – though Xbox LIVE Gold membership is a prerequisite.

If you're not a Sky subscriber and are looking at this as a way of getting live Premiership football into your life, you'll need an Xbox LIVE Gold membership (£39.99 per year), a £15 Entertainment Pack for the movies, and a £19 Sports Pack.

That works out at £468 a year, though there is a £29.99 introductory deal that gets you three months of Xbox LIVE Gold and Sky Sports for a month.

If Sky Player and Xbox want to rival the BBC's iPlayer as well as the PS3's VoD service, it's going to have to be super-slick, easy to use – and affordable.

In typical Sky fashion, Sky Player on Xbox fulfils those first two criteria with aplomb. Equally typical is its premium price for non-Sky subscribers, but if you're already signed-up to its satellite service, Sky Player for Xbox is an innovation that introduces VoD and multiroom in the smoothest way possible.

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Netgear NeoTV 550 HD Network Media Player Review

Legit Mods and Ends Reviews

NeoTV 550 - Netgear's Flagship HD Media Player

When Netgear introduced the NeoTV 550 last summer, their goals was to make a complete digital media server that plays movies, music, and photos shared on your computer or networked devices including PCs and Macs.  The NeoTV 550 displays and plays your media in full 1080p with HD 7.1 Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound.  It has a built in SD card slot as well as a couple of USB ports so that you bring over your media directly to the media player without a network.

The immediate problem for the Netgear NeoTV 550 is that in the past year or so, there has been a tremendous influx of media players and media streaming enabled devices on the market.  With a retail price of $199, the NeoTV 550 starts off behind the curve being one of the most expensive players on the market.  One of our favorite players – the Western Digital Live Hub carries the same MSRP, but the Western Digital comes with a 1TB hard drive for on-board storage.  The question is: Can the NeoTV 550 deliver performance to justify this cost?

Netgear recently released a robust firmware upgrade for the NeoTV 550 HD Media Player to give what was already a solid media player a few new bells and whistles.  Firmware 3.0.325 which was released a short time ago features Video and Audio improvements as well as a slew of multimedia streaming upgrades and bug fixes. Today we look at how Netgear’s newest upgrades compares to other top players on the market. 

The Netgear NeoTV 550 Featured Specifications

System Requirements

Connections

• Two (2) USB ports (1 front, 1 back)


• SD card slot


• eSATA port


• 10/100 Ethernet

Languages

• English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish

Media Sources

• USB Storage devices


• eSATA storage devices


• SD memory card


• CIFS/Samba, NFS


• UPnP AV and DLNA Servers


• Windows Media Player 11 Media Sharing

Video and Audio Output

• HDMI 1.3a, 36bpp deep color, 12 bit xvYCC processing and HDCP 1.2 compliant


• Component video


• Composite video


• Stereo analog audio


• S/PDIF optical digital audio

Digital Media File Formats

• Codec format:


• H.264 HP@L4.1 up to 1080p


• VC1 MP@HL, AP@L3


• WMV 9


• MPEG-2 MP@HL up to 1080p


• MPEG-4 Part 2 ASP@L5 to 10 Mbps (Xvid)


• MPEG1/2/4 SD


• H.263

• Container format: AVI, Xvid, MOV, MP4, MPEG2 PS, MPEG2-TS, DVD ISO/VOB/IFO, MKV, ASF, AVCHD, DivX, WMV, M4A, M2TS, MTS, MP1, MP2, MPG, DVR-MS, BDMV

• Blu-ray (external USB Blu-ray player not supported)

• Audio:


• Dolby Digital (AC3), Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD


• DTS 2.0+, DTS HD and DTS HD MA (passthru)


• MP3 up to 320 Kbps or variable bit rate (VBR)


• Gapless playback MP3, FLAC, M4A, M2TS


• WMA8 and WMA9 up to 192 Kbps or variable bit rate (VBR)


• WMAPro, AAC, FLAC (to 5.1, 192Khz), PCM LPCM/WAV (to 5.1, 192Khz)


• Internet radio (streaming MP3)


• MKA

• Subtitle:


• SRT, SMI, SSA, SUB, TXT, DVD, PGS, VOBSUB, SUB/IDX
  

Next Page - NeoTV 550 - Box Contents & Setup

Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 - No Sound, Media Player won't play media files, Photoshop won't load up

Date Fixed : 04.16.10

Owner : Ms. Sheila

Unit : Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 Laptop

Operating System : Win Vista and Win XP (Win Vista was Corrupted)

Technician : Drokz

URL : http://clhidohsr.blogspot.com

PROBLEM :

Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 with Win XP Operating system have problems with playing media files like to play music or play videos. It also made Photoshop CS to be corrupted and unusable. There was no sign of virus attack.

CLIENT REQUESTS :

File Backup (PDF, Word, Excel, Presentation, Pictures, Mp3, etc..)

Web Cam should be installed and run

Limewire and Photoshop should work

INTERVENING FACTORS :

Toshiba Satellite A135 - S4527 is lost

WebCam driver cd also lost

OBSERVATIONS :

Photoshop doesn't work

Media Players won't play any media file

Web Cam doesn't work

Can't establish a connection to the internet

TROUBLESHOOTING PROCEDURE :

- Since the laptop doesn't have any support cd (it was lost), we need to have a backup of the currently installed driver. This can be achieved by using softwares capable of extracting currently installed drivers in your computer. In my case, I used Hiren's boot cd and then DoubleDriver. It can easily be downloaded and also free.

- The requested files were then had backup and saved it in a 300-GB External Drive.

- It is now time to troubleshoot what makes all things go wrong. I then asked Ms. Sheila what was the last action she or a user has done to her laptop. She said that an XP Service Pack 3 was installed and everything went unusually wrong. There is a proper procedure in installing the Service Pack 3 Update at the Microsoft Support Site

- I uninstalled the Service Pack 3 from the Control Panel but the changes of the update seems to be already "permanent"

- Now the update might have possibly caused the changes, she said the installation was stopped and restarted. And upon restart, there was another instance of Win XP on the boot selection screen. 1 for Vista and Two for Win XP. The installation should be rolled back through System Restore. Here is the procedure for System Restore:

a. Go to "Start" Button then to "Run"

b. In your "Run" box type "restore" (without the quotations)

c. Click on the "rstrui" icon and run the System Restore

d. Choose a restoration point and the system will automatically restart to restore to the given restoration point.

- In our case System Restoration didn't work out. So we need another program to have the system files fixed. So I used ERD Commander to do the job.

- After using the ERD Commander, results were just the same. The changes made by the update could not be rolled back. So I decided to re-install the XP SP 2 Operating System.

- The XP installation was done and files were saved to the local drive. Also, the drivers were updated from the driver backup made earlier using Hiren's Bootable CD.

- The Web Cam was also installed and it functions well after the Operating System Re-Installation. Installed Photoshop and also working well. The failed Service Pack 3 installation must have caused the problems.

REPORT :

Failed Service Pack 3 Update of XP if not installed properly causes undesirable results like making other programs not run and or makes it not run because of its strict security.

Cowon iAudio 7 MP3 player

The iAudio 7 DAP player has been released by Cowon. You may have seen them before with the ever creative iAudio 6 player. The screen is just 1.3 inches making the player very small. The screen can be display 260k colours. It now uses flash memory (8GB) rather then the 0.85 inch disk drive in version 6. Support has been added for FLAC and OGG. What impresses me most, other then the looks of the device, is that it has a lithium polymer battery which will last 60 hours. The DAP can be charged via USB which is great if you are out and about travelling. The iAudio 7 player will set you back $246 for the 8GB flash version.