Western Digital TV Live Plus Network Media Player Review

 With multimedia content coming from everywhere, you can now watch it all together on your television with the Western Digital TV Live Plus network media player. Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn check out the device that streams online content, access your home network or digital camera and more for $120.

What You Need to Know

• It fits nicely near your TV since it's so small (only about 5” across) and it also has plenty of outputs including composite out, component out, optical audio out and HDMI out for 1080p playback
• You just connect an Ethernet cord from your router to the media player
• Then, connect HDMI (or another output) to your TV, that's it
• It doesn't have built-in Wi-Fi, but it does support a lot of wireless USB network adapters, so you can use one of those
• The graphical interface is similar to a lot of other gadgets we've reviewed, which means it's easy to pick up and use
• You might have to dive into the menus and folders a little, but it's not too bad
• They also show thumbnails of images and video
• Overall, it's very simple and self-explanatory
• We dropped a bunch of movie, music, and picture files on a thumb drive (all in different file formats) and almost all of them played just fine
• We only ran into a few that wouldn't play
• Connecting to a computer is also just as easy, whether you’re using Windows or a MAC, you can stream media from shared folders, or transfer files
• Internet content like Pandora, Netflix, Live365, and YouTube are a few of the streaming services available, and they all work exactly as intended
• Video quality was also great, even if your video had to be scaled up and the capability to display video up to 1080p is very nice

Price

• $120

Overall Rating

• 4 Seals of Approval Out of 5 (How do we rate gadgets?)
• It might be a little more than other media streamers, but apart from a few format and interface hang-ups, it does everything it says it can do very well

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