The WD TV is a consumer device that was produced by

Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...

which plays videos, images, and music from USB drives or network locations. The device was introduced in 2008 and played

high-definition video High-definition video (HD video) is video of higher resolution and quality than standard-definition. While there is no standardized meaning for ''high-definition'', generally any video image with considerably more than 480 vertical scan lines (No ...

through an

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controller, ...

port, and standard video through

composite video Composite video is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video (typically at 525 lines or 625 lines) as a single channel. Video information is encoded on one channel, unlike the higher-quality S-Video (two channels) a ...

cables. The device had support for most common video and audio formats. The WD TV was discontinued as of August 2016.

Models

WD TV (1st Gen)

In November 2008 Western Digital introduced the WD TV. with full HD 1080p multimedia player with DTS pass-through only. The hardware starts with a 300 MHz TangoX MIPS 4KEc from Sigma Designs, which has 100 MB of memory.

WD TV (2nd Gen)

Updated device with 2-channel DTS support. Uses the same Sigma SMP8655 Secure Media Processor as the Live.

WD TV Mini

Released in Fall 2009, it was a Media Player with DVD quality, upscales to 1080i, Plays back

RealVideo RealVideo, or also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 10. RealVideo is supported ...

and many other popular file formats with no need for transcoding, but lacks the ability to play H.264 encoded video. It is the only WD TV device without HDMI, providing only analog video output.

WD TV Live

Released in Fall 2009 with Full HD 1080p resolution. An updated device with 2-channel DTS, streaming and network support, which comes in the form of an

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

port on the back. Also compatible with certain wireless USB adapters. Connects to Internet sites:

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

(until 2017),

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...

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myTV MyTV (or My TV) may refer to these television brands: Africa *MYtv, a South African TV channel Asia *Television Broadcasts Limited's online service in Hong Kong *My TV (Bangladeshi TV channel) *MYTV Broadcasting, a Malaysian broadcaster *myTV (In ...

Pandora In Greek mythology, Pandora (Greek: , derived from , ''pān'', i.e. "all" and , ''dōron'', i.e. "gift", thus "the all-endowed", "all-gifted" or "all-giving") was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hes ...

Mediafly Mediafly is a privately held technology company based in Chicago, Illinois that provides Mobile sales enablement, mobile enablement software. History Mediafly was founded by Carson Conant in 2006 as a podcatcher. In addition to its mobile apps, in ...

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stream A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream ...

content from a home network. Supports a wide variety of the most popular file formats. No need for transcoding.

and DVD menu support added in firmware update. The device supports three playlist formats. The

Sigma Designs Sigma Designs was an American public corporation that designed and built high-performance system-on-a-chip semiconductor technologies for Internet-based set-top boxes, DVD players/recorders, high-definition televisions, media processors, digital ...

SMP8655 SoC inside the WD TV Live features a 500 MHz CPU, a 333 MHz coprocessor, a 333 MHz DSP, 512 MB of DRAM, and 256 MB of NAND flash memory. Western Digital has tweaked the original Sigma SMP8600 Family design slightly by including 6 video Digital to Analog Converters (DACs) which should give it the ability to handle high-def content with ease. (Model number WDBAAN0000NBK).

WD TV Live Plus (WD TV Live 2nd Gen)

Released early in 2010 and having all the features of the WD TV Live along with

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

streaming support. In order to support Netflix, a macrovision enabled SoC was required (

SMP8654) and the Linux system is also now encrypted. However, actual user experience has lagged for some. As of April 12, 2011, Netflix Canada works on a WD Live TV Plus as long as the firmware has been upgraded to version 1.04.31_B or newer. It is also known as WDTV Live Plus (Model number WDBABX0000NBK, WDBREC0000NBK, WDBG3A0000NBK). Reviews: WD TV Live Plus was met with generally positive reviews. Review Horizon names it a worthy successor of WD TV Live.

WD TV Live Hub

Released in fall 2010, this is a WD TV Live device with an internal 1 TB storage disk. It uses the same

SMP8654 found in the WD TV Live Plus with four 64 MB Nanya NT5TU64M16GG DDR2 667/800 MHz modules (256 MB total), and a 2 GB Samsung K9F2G080UB flash chip.

WD TV Live Streaming (WD TV Live 3rd Gen)

Released in October 2011. It has customizable themes, a larger remote control, can get content information from the internet, plays DRM-protected services, has a built-in wireless adapter, a 10/100Mbit/s RJ45 Ethernet port and is the first WD TV model to include the Spotify service. The WD TV Live has WiFi and a Sigma Designs SMP8670AD 700 MHz processor with 512MB of DDR2 memory from Nanya. It is also known as WD TV Live Gen 3 (NTSC model number WDBHG70000NBK, PAL model number WDBGXT0000NBK).

WD TV Play (WD TV 4th Gen)

According to the WD Site, it was released in early 2013. (NTSC model number WDBMBA0000NBK). Their exact words are: The software does not support DTS or MPEG2, as these features were removed.

WD TV Media Player (WD TV 2nd Gen)

Released in July 2014. (NTSC model number WDBYMN0000NBK, PAL model number WDBPUF0000NBK). Identical hardware to the WDTV Live Streaming but missing Netflix. This last version of the WDTV was finally discontinued by Western digital in June 2016 and is no longer available for sale through the manufacturer.

Hacking

The WD TV has been hacked to enable further options, including using external optical drives, Ethernet connection via USB to Ethernet adapters, bittorrent downloading and improved thumbnail preview images. The newest versions of the WD TV (Streaming Media) have encrypted firmware and there are efforts to continue hacking them.

References

External links

* {{Western Digital Linux-based devices Western Digital products