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

I have been using WD TV Live for a week now. I also updated the firmware to Release 1.01.11 (11/16/09). There are five problems:

1) I have personal home videos shot in HD (AVCHD) using Sony HDR-TG1 camcorder. I want to copy all the AVCHD files in a portable hard drive and play them through WD TV Live. It plays the files but there is a gap of 2 seconds where my TV screen goes blank. The reason why it is happening is each shot is saved in a MTS file within AVCHD folder by HD camcorder (that's the way it supposed to be). It tries to play each MTS file sequentially and when it moves from one file to another, it creates a pause of 2 seconds when your screen goes blank. It supposed to play all MTS files within AVCHD sequentially without any gap. The gap is very annoying because it does not treat AVCHD as one movie but a sequence of movies. So, unless you combine all MTS files into one huge one file, then it should work, but for me this is a bug and it is the biggest turn down for using WD TV Live for AVCHD. To put it in perspective, imagine you ripped your DVD video on an external hard drive and it has multiple VOB files. When you play the movie, WD TV Live plays all the VOB files fine without any gap. Why can't it treat AVCHD movie the same way?

2) Sometimes when you want to jump to next chapter while watching DVD format movies from your hard drive, it jumps to the beginning of the movie. I do not fudge with how DVD videos are extracted and copied into hard drive. I simply copy the entire movie files from DVD movie and it still does that.

3) Occasionally, it also freezes when you try to fast forward. You have to power down WD TV Live and restart it.

4) If you loose the remote, then the product is useless. Unless you want to buy a second universal remote and make it "learn" the signal and have a backup one just in case. There are no buttons on WD TV Live.

5) Image quality is just okay when you play HD movies. Nothing great. If you have PS3 or similar, then you will see the difference.

Overall, I do not recommend this product until WD fixes all the issues especially gaps in AVCHD one.Get more detail about Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN.