WD TV Live Hub (1TB)

• Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 23 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars

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• 7 stars

  Plays almost every type of of video file .

  by DKDavis52a on November 17, 2011

  Pros: Reasonably easy to get media onto the hard drive and play from there.Good variety of connections (lack of wireless is overhyped issue - get a Powerline network kit).Plays every file type I've sent to it and in all types of containers (ISO, MKV, M2TS)

  Cons: 1. Documentation is horrid - except for making connections.
  2. Fast forward/reverse/skip to specific time are klunky, don't actually work a significant portion of the time, and frequently result in videos restarting or skipping to the next video.

  Summary: I am a fairly experienced user. I have used several Archos devices, Boxee Box, Apple TV, Roku, Lacie (which was my favorite) and now the Live Hub.
  Currently, the Live ...

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  Summary: I am a fairly experienced user. I have used several Archos devices, Boxee Box, Apple TV, Roku, Lacie (which was my favorite) and now the Live Hub.
  Currently, the Live Hub is my favorite, but there is certainly room for improvement.
  First, the good. I have not found a video format that is incompatible (I do not use MOV). They all play. Every container I use (M2TS, ISO, MKV) works just fine.
  I have not had any problem with the quality of video files playing either - including 1080p encoded in h.264 with AC-3 audio.
  I use a Harmony One remote, which controls the basic functions okay, but there are some specific buttons I've had to reprogram.
  If you just want a device which is easy to attach to your computer as well as your TV, will play back a wide variety of media files - and do this very well, and especially if you want an internal hard drive...I've tried most of them and this is the best.
  Netfilx playback is as good as it is through my HTPC - which is to say it is only limited by my slow DSL connection.
  Now for the bad.
  Attaching the device and getting media onto the Hub is relatively easy - though I had to get some of the management software off the internet (I don't know why it was not included on the Hub - it has a hard drive for goodness sake). And, I did not even know I needed the software until the hub, though recognized by my network could not actually be used. I went to a few online forums until I found a link to the right place at the WD site (I had gone there initially and searched for "Live Hub" but found nothing). Once the software was running, moving media to the device was easy.
  When you boot it up you get this screen with several containers "Photos, Videos, Music, Settings", etc. One of these is "Folders"...clicking on that keeps giving me an error message that "No files are found." Since the documentation is so poor I have never found out what this Folder does, but not using it does not seem to affect the primary function of the Hub (nothing about this on the WD website, even the huge PDF you can download - which I found to be so poorly indexed it was worthless).
  There is also no docuemntation to tell you how to get media off your network. Under settings you can tell the device to use the network, but though I have several terabytes of music, photos, and video on the hardwired network, it never has actually provided me a way to access this.
  For purposes of seeing how well the Hub works I made digital back-ups of several DVD's I own including Blu-Rays (I do not encourage piracy...so any copies I make would of course be temporary and for educational purposes only). I put these copies on the hard drive and allowed the Hub to create a media library. It came up with a list of movies - but none of the metadata (which I had included with the movies) appeared ... not even the cover art which I had included in the folders.
  I found out that the Hub requires that the video file, the folder, and the jpg of the cover have to have exactly the same name. All of mine had slight variations in the names, so I needed to fix this (there is apparently an individual who has created a program which automates some of the work, but I have not tried his program). So, I did all this renaming by hand. And, despite my making sure that all the names are exactly the same, the Hub sill is only able to find the covers for about half of my movies. I have looked at this repeatedly and know that there is no difference between the movies/folders where the Hub finds the cover art and displays it and the movies/folders wher the Hub does not. (By the way I did this manually through a networked computer - there may be a way to get cover art into the right place through the Hub, but I have not found it).
  For metatdata (movie length, synopsis, actors, ratings, etc.) I already had info from IMDB for every movie. Though this was in an XML file, with the correct name, included in the correct folder, the Hub would not recognize it. So, I had to, one by one, go to the movie in the Hub interface, tell the Hub to search it's database (by the way, no documentation on how this is done anywhere - I just kept pushing buttons unil I got a message asking if I wanted to get content info), and then select the appropriate movie from the database. The Hub would then have the metadata, but will only display this in a specific view (called "Gallery") and even then - though the data was obtained through the Hub - about 50% of the time no information is displayed...And in the "Gallery" view, the cover art is almost never displayed.
  Okay, no metadata and no cover art is fine - none of the other devices I used was very good at this either (except Apple TV, but it is proprietary and play limited file types) - I can play files if the name is listed...which the Hub does do.
  The fast forward and rewind buttons (as well as the "skip to a certain time" function) do not do what you wish. Sometimes the fastforward will do just that, sometimes it will skip, sometimes it will skip to the next file. Most of the time the rewind button skips back and frequently it skips all the way back to the begining of the file. I have only tried to use the "Skip to a certain time" function a couple of times because...well...it doesn't do that. You input a time, and most of the time nothing happens. Sometimes, it restarts the file.
  I really do like the Hub. I am hoping that future firware updates address these issues and provide a more intuitive interface. Also, WD would do consumers a big favor if they would just have someone who has actually used the device sit with the people who designed it and write a coherent, well indexed user manual.

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  3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.

• 4 stars

  Extremely flexible, but totally unusable

  by petemcc on December 21, 2011

  Pros: Can play most audio and video file formats

  Cons: A lack of detailed documentation and a confusing interface, compounded by software bugs, makes this unit basically unusable for me. Examples, files don't show up on system and I have yet to get file sharing to work with Windows 7.

  Summary: This unit offers a lot, but without detailed documentation it is very difficult to configure and use, you will rely a lot on online support forums, where the data is ...

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  Summary: This unit offers a lot, but without detailed documentation it is very difficult to configure and use, you will rely a lot on online support forums, where the data is often unreliable.
  I have not been able to get file sharing to work with Windows 7, and syncing is somewhat of a mystery. I moved to the WD from an Apple TV which had a very simple, easy to use interface, but the WD suffers from usability issues. I used the Apple TV all of the time (despite it's limitations) but find that I just don't use the WD ... every time I do there seems to be a new issue to debug.
  The interface to scroll through music is pathetically slow, and the Media Library is nowhere near as useful as it sounds.
  There are so many quirks that you will find, you cannot setup a photo screensaver from a hierarchical folder system, the screensaver picks up all the album artwork as photos, not all the menu options from DVDs are available.
  I have a solid background in home theater and computing, anyone who doesn't should absolutely avoid this unit.

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  1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.

• 1 stars

  It sucks!!

  by surannga on December 18, 2011

  Pros: Yet to find any

  Cons: 1. Takes ages to sync with external USB devices
  2. Fatal system error every time I play a video
  3. Takes ages to restart and compile media library
  4. Cannot directly connect to a computer
  5. Not compatible with commonly available wireless adapters.

  Summary: I would not recommend this product even to my worst enemy.

  Summary: I would not recommend this product even to my worst enemy.

  1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.

• 7 stars

  Samsung phone to WD TV Live HUb

  by bexmalex on April 16, 2013

  Pros: Very strange!!!

  Cons: Very strange!!!!!

  Summary: Does anyone have any idea why, when I uploaded a photo from my Samsung phone to Facebook, it appeared on the WD TV Live Hub at the beginning of a ...

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  Summary: Does anyone have any idea why, when I uploaded a photo from my Samsung phone to Facebook, it appeared on the WD TV Live Hub at the beginning of a movie?

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• 7 stars

  Great for all my movies & music

  by bratchew on March 28, 2012

  Pros: Plays most file types, sleek interface, large hard drive

  Cons: sometimes could be a bit quicker - but it keeps getting better after each firmware update

  Summary: On first buying this it was quite buggy and froze often, firmware updates have changed this and fixed many of the problems such as re-scanning for hours after reboot, it ...

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  Summary: On first buying this it was quite buggy and froze often, firmware updates have changed this and fixed many of the problems such as re-scanning for hours after reboot, it now runs smoothly. It is a great device for streaming media and it has built in HD and also RCA outputs, I use both at the same time for my multi room hook up, but for those without multi room you could hook it up to a single TV that has either HD or RCA and still stream to all your laptops and computers.

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• 5 stars

  capabilities are very nice

  by martinvirtual on February 28, 2012

  Pros: I love the ease of a network hard drive for business data and able to have many functions to load to the tv like music server and movie and picture playback.

  Cons: take forever to load content into the program on the tv side still awaiting for it is scan hours later witch makes all other onscreen movements a nightmare.WHATS TAKING SO LONG! show me my data hoping it will work better after the crappy scan's done

  Summary: if I can get past the no data found i will love it wish it had built in wifi

  Summary: if I can get past the no data found i will love it wish it had built in wifi

• 10 stars

  Love this product.

  by bummydill on December 29, 2011

  Pros: easy to use, plays all formats. many extras

  Cons: non that i can find yet

  Summary: Not sure why everyone else has so many issues. this is a great product. I connect 2 other computers, a dlna tv and a motorola xoom and they all can ...

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  Summary: Not sure why everyone else has so many issues. this is a great product. I connect 2 other computers, a dlna tv and a motorola xoom and they all can stream movies and tv shows flawlessly. It can take awhile to snyc from a hard drive if you have alot of files on it but that is understandable. I love that it will find the album/movie pictures and information for the movies and music. Makes it great when searching for a movie to watch.

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• 1 stars

  Don't buy.

  by Stop2011 on December 28, 2011

  Pros: You can connect to facebook,

  Cons: Expensive ,Freeze all the time, dont have crackle,and free movies.

  Summary: Waste time and money, need to develop more the product. is only marketing.

  Summary: Waste time and money, need to develop more the product. is only marketing.

• 9 stars

  WD TV Live Hub is a great device for downloaders

  by skyshark202002 on September 29, 2011

  Pros: Great video and audio quality, HD video playback is crisp, Plays virtually every format I have tried, 1 TB hard drive so you don't have to pack your computer with movies, Plenty of apps and every time they update the firmware more are included There are a

  Cons: No WiFi, that really sucks for a unit that costs 200 bucks and if you are not hardwiring ethernet cable WD is only compatible with a fairly small list of USB network adapters. I bought 2 popular ones from Netgear and Linksys and neither one worked. So tha

  Summary: Overall the WD TV Live Hub is awsome. I researched the Apple TV, Roku and Seagate products and they have way to many limitations. I love apple and have many ...

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  Summary: Overall the WD TV Live Hub is awsome. I researched the Apple TV, Roku and Seagate products and they have way to many limitations. I love apple and have many apple products but their TV does not accept avi or mkv files and many others so if you download torrents forget it, you have to spend all your time converting files so itunes will accept it first. The WD is the only product like this that work with all files and it also has the built in HD unlike the others. Now that I found a wireless network adapter for the WD tv, I love it and am very satisfied with my purchase. I wish apple would have made a better product but they never want to be compatible with anything but apple so get the WD you wont be sorry.

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• 8 stars

  Great Features with a few Major Flaws

  by bhs506 on August 27, 2011

  Pros: 1TB Hard Drive, Probably the largest file format support I could find, Expandable, Plays files off hard drives formatted for macs or with Time Machine

  Cons: Does not consistently detect WiFi Adapter and Hard Drive when both are plugged in. I've tried changing the USB ports they are plugged into and still have the same problem. Does not play 1080p files from attached USB hard drive well and extremely slow fi

  Summary: I wanted to stream media from my laptop, easily play media stored on a hard drive backed up via Time Machine, and be able to play a large variety of ...

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  Summary: I wanted to stream media from my laptop, easily play media stored on a hard drive backed up via Time Machine, and be able to play a large variety of media formats. This device does everything but I really wish it had Wifi built in. I'm also really PISSED that when I have a wifi adapter and hard drive plugged in, the machine has trouble detecting both devices. Still happy overall with the device.

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