WD TV HD Media Player: The Pirate's Media Center

 

So, you've "acquired" digital media. Movies, music, pictures, TV. It's all in different formats and it's all stuck on your computer. How do you sit at home, break out the Doritos, and watch it on your TV? Well, you could drop $900+ on a Home Theater PC, or the cheaper option is to burn DVDs (assuming you have a DVD burner and player) which takes hours to do (encoding time, burning time, setup etc.).

But here's the thing. And the thing is called the Western Digital WD TV HD Media player. It's a little box (just over 6 inches long) with 2 USB ports, a composite TV out, an HDMI out, and a remote.

"But how do I use this thing to fix the issue you bring up?" you may ask. Well, it's simple: Plug any USB drive with media on it into the WD TV, plug the WD TV into your TV, and enjoy.

Yup, it's that friggin' simple, just plug in your external hard drive to the WD TV, and it plays the media on it. WD TV supports a ton of video formats, from .avi files encoded pretty much any way there is to HD .mkv files to .mpegs to .movs. It plays a ton of audio formats as well, including more obscure ones like .flac and .ogg, as well as your standard .gif, .jpeg, .bmp, .png image formats. Plus the firmware gets updated regularly with close ties to the community over at the WD TV Wiki.

It's also really portable, since the device itself is small, everything is truly plug and play, and all you'll have to lug around is your external media. Really, WD TV will accept pretty much anything that can be recognized as a "mass storage device" so even flash drives, SD cards and readers, or cameras can be used.

The kicker: this little box will set you back $100. Though I've seen it on sale at various times for around $70. Still, that's not too much considering I've personally found mine to be the most convenient way, not only to play my digital media on the TV, but to bring it with me everywhere.

Oh, and it's not like the device was designed to be used for pirated media. But hey, neither was Bit Torrent.

The interface is dead simple, and includes the ability to index the media on the drives connected to it, as well as simple file browsing. It's truly an awesome device.

WD TV.

WD TV at Newegg.