At last, Western Digital finally unveiled their most complete media player offering to date, the WD TV Live Hub media center. We showed you the WD Elements Play before and the one glaring feature it lacks is network connectivity. Well the WD TV Live Hub addressed that shortcoming.
The WD TV Live Hub is a media player and Network Access Storage combined. It has a built-in 1TB drive inside that can play all your media files including Full HD 1080p videos and it can also be connected to your home network via LAN cable for some file sharing action between various devices.
The WD TV Live Hub is also a media server: HD video, music and photos can be streamed from the onboard hard drive to any DLNA/UPnP-compatible TV or multimedia device in the home network, including the WD TV Live HD media player, connected TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 game consoles. Users also can stream content from their WD TV Live Hub media center to iPads, iPhones or Android smartphones using third-party applications.
Online services integration include Facebook which I’m guessing will be tricky to navigate using a remote control, Nextflix which is not allowed in our region, YouTube, Flickr, Pandora, AccuWeather and daily podcasts from CNN, NBC, MTV and ESPN.
What’s nice about WD TV Live Hub is its UI customization where you can personalize screen backgrounds and user interface themes and set favorites and content ratings. Standard wired or wireless USB keyboards can be used for simpler text input for activities such as searches of local content and YouTube and Facebook interaction.
Other key features of the WD TV Live Hub media center include:
- Compatibility with virtually all TV sets thanks to an HDMI 1.4, composite video and component video output;
- Automatic sync of shared digital media folders from PCs and Macs on the network with the internal hard drive to provide easy playback of new content.
- Customizable user interface and programmable remote;
- Ultra-compact design that easily fits into almost any entertainment center;
- Two USB ports that allow seamless media playback from USB drives, camcorders and digital cameras
- WiFi-readiness (with adapter)
- A 1-year limited warranty
The WD TV Live Hub media center is available in 1 TB storage capacity and has an SRP of Php9,900. Expensive? I’m guessing the price is just right considering it has a 1 TB storage. It is distributed by Axis Global Technologies Inc. here in our country.