Lowest Price Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN

I looked at all available media players...none were perfect but this one offered support for a wide variety of media and services. Western Digital also has done a good job of supporting Macs (e.g. this can read an attached NFS+ formatted volume) and once SMB was enabled in the Sharing System Preferences it immediately saw my shares. I would like to use this as a a 100% network media player and though it works fine for some files and file types, it has problems with large HD files (mkv, MPEG2 TS, etc). However I find no such problems with more compressed HD DIVX content. Obviously it seems the device is not caching the large files properly when their bit rate is too fast for the network to handle. WD seems aware of this issue as it's all over their forums and hopefully an upgrade will be issued. In fact when I first plugged it in it said their was an upgrade and i went very smoothly Instead, I have a small USB drive attached to it and just copy HD content to that drive. The picture quality of HD and upscaled content is extraordinary. Though it can't display the iPhoto library directly, there is a work around....select the iPhoto library in the Finder and control+click and select "show package contents" and then share the modified pictures folder in the network shares preference window. The remote is simple but adequate.

My only wish is that over time WD releases more Internet content and features such as HULU, Netflix, etc. or allow third parties to write plug-ins for it. This is a really amazing device, what it does for the money is quite extraordinary. Before this I was using a $1,000 laptop to do the same thing. My only real complaint other than the stuttering mentioned is a blah interface, it would be nice to skin it or replace it with Boxee, Plex or XBMC. Supposedly some people have gotten other media centers to work and I'd love to hear how so I can take advantage of their content.

I highly recommend this player. Get more detail about Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN.