WD TV Live – Great Entertainment for You and the Kids

Maximum Entertainment on your TV

The WD TV Live is the perfect solution for you and the kids for finding and viewing your films/series quickly rather than digging out DVDs (or VHSs!). I ripped all my DVDs and cleared out a whole wall of shelves and the DVD player is sitting in a cupboard. Even with newer versions of the WD TV Live and smart TVs I don’t see any need to upgrade; I keep a 6 year old and 2 year old happy with this solution; they are happy to watch over and over again the 30 something kids films and series I have. They’re not too worried about newer films, the classics seem to be the most popular. They don’t appreciate the surround sound as the CDA helicopters arrive in Monsters, Inc but Casino Royale and Gladiator are heart stopping through my Onkyo amp and Audica speakers.

There is also a handy app to let you control it from you phone or tablet over wifi which makes keyboard entry (e.g. for youtube) much easier that using the remote control.

The WD TV Live Techie Stuff

This plays any format you throw at it and will output surround sound via HDMI or HDMI and optical. It will also output in red/white audio and yellow video cables, so should work with any amp or TV. BTW, Don’t spend more than a few pounds on HDMI cables, the don’t need to be gold plated or handle signal interference; they’re digital. It does let you use the attached drive as a NAS and another WD TV Live in the kids’ or your bedroom can stream from your main WD TV Live, obviously this is dependent on how good your WiFi is around the house. I use an extender which works well, but you don’t want to be tucked up in bed have to reset routers, so it may be easier to have a local storage per unit. I have a 32GB USB stick and have that as a NAS too so I can just copy from one to the other. Another solution is to have large-ish drive on each and have a scheduled job run to keep them all in sync; also a good backup solution.

UK Specific

It’s an international product so calls for the addition of UK 4OD and ITV player are hopefully in the queue, but BBCiPlayer (in particular CBeebies for kids) should keep the whole family happy.

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