In comes the deal I got for the Western Digital WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player. Best Buy regularly had it for $129 but was running a special on it for $99. Throw in the gift card I got for my birthday for Best Buy and the deal was on!
Hooking it up to my TV was a breeze. The only thing I didn't have was an HDMI cable, so I went the Component cable route instead. 720p vs 1080p isn't a huge deal in the bedroom... especially since the videos I wanted to stream from my home server weren't in 1080p anyways.
The interface was easy to navigate through for the most part. When booting it up, I was notified immediately of a new firmware that was found. Prior to downloading this, I wanted to cruise around it and see if it was something that I wanted to keep. It found my home shares on the network without issue, which was nice. It also found my Media Center PC's recorded TV drive. I decided to play a recorded show... no dice. The picture came up nice and clear, but within 5 seconds, the audio started getting choppy and the video started slowing down frame by frame. Not good.
I decided to look for my PlayOn media streamer. It found this without issue - even though the WD TV isn't on PlayOn's list of supported devices! I was actually VERY pleased when I started playing a show. It actually queued up MUCH quicker than I had ever experienced through the Xbox 360! This alone was a huge benefit!
Next, I decided to try to play a ripped AVI movie I had on my Home Server. It found these folders without issue and played video back quite nicely. What was left? Upgrade the firmware, of course and take advantage of other new features! Besides - maybe the firmware added support for Windows Recorded TV Media (WTV files).
Well - the upgrade went off without a hitch. Only problem was that it didn't seem to fix the playback of WTV files. OK - let's look around and see what other new features were included with the new firmware. Facebook? Nice! Twitter? Nice! Plus, there were many other Internet based sites available natively on the box now!
OK - enough playing around - time to watch Conan through PlayOn... What? No media found in the PlayOn folder? You're kidding me? It was working before! Let me go to my Media Center PC and restart the PlayOn service... still no dice!?!? Let me look for an updated PlayOn server file... nope. How about rebooting the computer. Something surely isn't right here. Still no dice...
Well - I decided to let Google be my friend. Here it is - some firmwares released by WD disable some features people find useful - particularly PlayOn! This is not acceptable!
So, I found a nice forum online that lets me download previous versions of WD Firmware. I downloaded it easy enough, modified a version file to trick the box into thinking there was a new firmware and I was on my way.
Rebooting after downgrading the firmware resulted in PlayOn being restored!!! Yahoo!!! But, now I don't have Facebook... not a huge loss, but it is a loss nonetheless...
Now - I've got to figure out if I want to keep this $100 box to watch ripped movies and PlayOn streaming content or if I really want to take advantage of something that will play WTV files to watch the shows we typically watch in bed - recorded shows and fast forward through the commercials.
Now all I have to do is find something that will do that for the same budget I've been looking at. A Blu-ray player may do it, but those aren't at the price point I'm looking at... Google TV is supposed to be really cool, but those are up at the Xbox price level...
Back to Google to do some more research and see if I can find something else that will work for me... I guess I could always convert the WTV files to something a little more friendly, but that takes time and resources and more hard drive space... Back to the drawing board before my return window runs out...
I'd look into the Google Revue - I know you said it was too much, but it really is the future.
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