So, about 5 years or so ago I decided to built a HTPC to replace my aging Tivo. It was an epic story, a massive amount of money was spent, but in the end I was rewarded with a 2 tuner DVR in a nice brushed aluminum home theater case with a vacuum fluorescent display. It was capable of recording 2 shows at once while watching another or streaming video from a network source, a decent feature set for the time. A lot of time (and expense) went into ensuring it was whisper quiet. No small task when your processor is a Pentium 4 single core power-gobbling toaster.

I don’t watch much “TV” anymore; about 6 months ago I canceled my cable subscription and went strictly OTA/Downloaded content. The only channels I miss are Discovery and Sci-Fi, and the content from those can be found if one looks hard enough.

With the digital transition my 2 tuners and DVR functionality was lost entirely but I was already streaming most of my video from my NAS in the basement anyway. A few months ago the power supply in the HTPC died. No longer having the resources I once did, I replaced it with a fairly cheap one to get by. It was louder, but it worked again. In the last few weeks, some other strange noises have been coming from the AV cabinet and sure enough it was the HTPC again. Nothing’s broke, I suspect a fan is going bad. The HTPC really is in a harsh environment, honestly I’m surprised I haven’t had more problems with it. It’s hot in that cabinet, it collects dust and cat hair.

Although I wasn’t yet searching for a replacement someone was talking about an interesting device yesterday: The Western Digital TV Live. This device is designed to sell more WD external hard drives.

My biggest problem with most streaming devices is that they require that you stream from the Internet or a connected PC running special software. This WD box requires neither. It plays 1080p content nativity with no transcoding or server software required. In addition to streaming from any attached USB device (thumb drive, hard drive, etc) it connects to standard SMB (Windows) network shares using credentials you supply and streams the content from there. It can stream an extremely diverse selection of audio and video formats as well as display photo slide shows.

It’s menu interface is very similar to the modern Sony horizontal bar interface, that is not a bad thing. WD implemented it well.

It streamed every Audio and Video file I threw at it, and I have some strange video file formats. After 4 hours of streaming 720p it was slightly warm. No network hiccups or pausing and skipping. Video/Audio sync was good, which is important since it’s not adjustable.

This is the least amount of research I’ve ever done in purchasing something. I went from not knowing it existed to plugging it in in less than 3 hours. I bought it locally at Best Buy with plans to return it when it performed poorly and didn’t meet my criteria. I was surprised at how good it was, and became curious as to why it was working so well so I went out to do some research and find out why.

This is a Linux box. They’re leveraging all the well implemented free video codecs available in Linux. This explains why it supports Matroska container formats and the several advanced codecs they usually contain. It also explains it’s solid SMB implementation and the hacker community I found working on customized firmware for the box.

It has some Internet streaming stuff for YouTube and some radio streaming but honestly I don’t care. I have no desire to watch 240×320 streams on my 42″ TV. It doesn’t really get in the way and I don’t care how it works. I’ll just assume it works well and never use it.

There a couple small issues.

If it’s going to stream things from the Internet, it better have Netflix streaming. The WD TV Live doesn’t. I don’t have Netflix yet, but every single person I know tells me how wonderful it is, one of these days I’ll break down and try it. My next Blu-Ray player will almost certainly include that, so it’s not a big deal that WD didn’t, but it just seems odd that it wasn’t included.

It doesn’t create thumbnails for content on network shares and it’s default method of browsing is via thumbnail. When browsing network shares with default settings you get many identical empty thumbnails and you have to highlight them to see what they are. Thankfully they included an option to not use thumbnails and use something truly revolutionary: File names. This makes things much easier to navigate. For audio files you can tell it to use file names, ID3 tags, or the artwork stored in the MP3 file.

The WD TV Live has no way to limit itself to 1 server, establish a preferred server, or create a shortcut to a specific server/share combination. This makes for many additional clicks in the UI. When you select Network Share, it presents you with every machine on your network that has sharing enabled (every Windows box does) in the server list, and you have to select on the one you want then move on to select the share that contains your files. It’s all presented in a file/folder view so it’s not really painful, but it’s more clicks than you really should have to make in a properly setup system.

It needs the ability to hide things. Hide menu items I don’t use, hide machines that don’t contain media files, hide shares that aren’t related, etc.

This isn’t for everyone. It can’t play DRM protected content, it doesn’t have WiFi (it’s optional), it doesn’t have netflix streaming or a web interface for control when the TV is powered down (for streaming music).

For me this was the very definition of impulse purchase which I almost never succumb to, but it appears it will work out quite well. I’ll decide for sure over the weekend, but I think it’s a keeper. It’ll appears that it will easily replace my old HTPC while being dead silent and much lower power consumption (12V 2A wall wart). It could replace my AudioTron as well, but I’m not sure I will retire it yet or not. The web interface on the AudioTron is good, and I don’t really want to power up the TV to select a song.