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

The top reasons for me to buy this product are
1) Watch YouTube Videos
2) Watch personal Photo & Video content on external hard drive/thumb drives

I made sure that ethernet jack is available in my living room where my HDTV resides. I had to do some work in my loft, basement. Changed some RJ-11 jacks to Cat5e jacks and used some couplers to route ethernet and/or phone to different rooms. I opened my amazon shipment and hooked it up and it immediately asked me to update to a new firmware 1.01.11 and I did. I could see picture on my philips plasma TV. So no problems with HDMI output to drive Philips TV.

First thing I tried is to sign in to YouTube and after I typed in my username and password and submit, it reboots. After I looked at the WDTV community site, I found lot of users have this problem. I could watch youtube videos by painfully typing in searches using remote. I expected it to save at least last 5 searches. It does not. If you accidentally go to home screen, you cannot go back to the videos you watched earlier. There are some features like most popular, most watched videos (by others) but I do not care about that. They need to fix this youtube account sign in problem. Apart from this there are doubts if Western Digital will negotiate a deal with youTube to continue showing their videos. Recently there are reports that some of the set top boxes have been blocked from accessing youTube like popcorn.

I tried Filckr but could not figure out how to search which I did not pursue further.

I plugged in a usb thumb drive that had some photos and videos I shot on my sony camera and it took too long to scan the drive. But I could watch them finally. I am not sure what will happen if I plug in an external hard drive with lot of data.

I had some posts on the WD TV community site but looks like they are fighting other bigger fires now. (Bricked units due to a faulty firmware. Fortunately I got this after they removed the faulty firmware ! 1.01.12)

I would advise buyers to first look at WD TV community website and see if they fix these problems. I do not know why there are many great reviews. I really do not care about too many different formats or 1080p. May be I should have purchased the NETGEAR media player(they are youTube partners according to some reports). I can change my review after they fix these problems. Get more detail about Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN.