WD TV Live Hub - A Star Hub

Your Personal Media in One Hub

Personal media players give you the flexibility to play all your digital media on any screen. It is very appealing for those of us who have built up a collection of videos, images and music on our computer(s) or external hard drives. Media players have gone through quite an evolution within the past few years. Once expensive with limited format support, most models now run the whole gamut of media formats and come with many additional features, such as being able to access the internet and play HD content. With internet support, many new models also boast of instant firmware updates from their respective manufacturers, thus easily extending format compatibility support as and when new requirements and needs arise.

Western Digital is a company well-known for their hard disks and more recently even their media players. Their latest iteration for a top of the line media player is the WD TV Live Hub, which is an evolution of their earlier media players, both in terms of features, appearance as well as performance. 

On paper the WD TV Live Hub looks to be a competent player; with the ability to play a host of media CODECs in full, glorious high definition resolution we come to expect. But we know that there are many other aspects of the player such as the user interface (UI), that will determine whether the player is more than just a big, black paperweight in your living room. Read on as we further assess it to meet our high expectations.

Live Viewing

Many media players in the market tend to sport uninspired designs. The Live Hub is no different. Though it's nothing special to look at, the Live Hub is an obvious improvement from Western Digital's earlier offerings. For example, the squat and stout WD TV Live Plus has got nothing on the Live Hub's slim and sleek profile. The Live Hub is dressed in black plastic with glossy black sides and a matte finish top. It may look boring, but the good news is it doesn’t feel cheap. The matte top finish gives it character while helping it stand out from the glossy, cheap plastic build of some of its competitors.

The front panel of the player is devoid of any other buttons except the power button which occupies the bottom left corner. There is also a USB port placed on the other end, at the bottom right corner. Once you power up the player, a WD logo will light up in white, right in the middle of the front panel, which also serves as a reminder for people who tend to leave their gadgets switched on after they are done with them. This logo light can be disabled in the settings if required, which is useful for those watching a movie in a dark room and wouldn't want any other light sources to distract their attention.

As with most A/V products, the ports and jacks are all located at the rear of the player. There’s a lone HDMI 1.4 jack, an S/PDIF jack and another USB port in addition to the one in the front of the player. There is an Ethernet port supporting Gigabit connections and for those who are still depending on analog connections, there are composite and component output jacks too. What surprised us was the player did not come with any cables, not even the relatively inexpensive composite cables.

Apart from the media player, it comes bundled with a shapely remote that provides a nice grip to it. The buttons on the remote are very straightforward and you'll have no difficulty understanding their functions. While it's a bit on the plump side, the remote gets the job done. 

Introducing Mochi

Besides evolving the physical design to a slimmer profile, the biggest overhaul is a new user interface known as Mochi. Mochi is one of the best-looking media player interfaces we have come across. And it's pretty easy to navigate too.

There are six tabs available on the homescreen: Services, Videos, Music, Photos, Files and Set Up. While Mochi is a fast and responsive UI when you are manipulating content/options within a tab, you might need to wait a bit when navigating between tabs on the home screen, as the UI does tend to load the animations first before letting you jump to the next option. When it recognized that the player was attached to the internet, it proceeded to download the latest firmware without us needing to manually check if the existing firmware was up-to-date. Though easy on the eyes and relatively simple to navigate, some playback and interface options are buried under unnecessary layers of menus.

The UI offers you a choice to customize the wallpaper and you can even select your own personal pictures, which have to be transferred to the player. In fact, you can customize how most of the menus look as well as how the files in the system are displayed, such as the option to display a video preview of video files.

As with many players on the market nowadays, the Live Hub offers a number of online services like Facebook and YouTube. There is also internet radio via Live365, though some, like Pandora do not work in this region. The Live Hub also offers support for USB keyboards, which helps greatly for certain services like Facebook.

The player comes with an internal hard disk of 1TB, which is very useful for those of us who wish to store media on the player itself. It's however less friendly to our attempt to change the hard drive. As its name suggest, the Live Hub doesn’t only function as a media player, but also as a storage hub for all your media. Once connected to a network, the player will appear as a hard drive or network drive, and you can just drag and drop files directly to the player.

Although the player is equipped with a wired Gigabit Ethernet connection, we would have preferred Wi-Fi as well for the added convenience. It is quite a hassle to connect Ethernet cables from the media player to your network point or router if you're home isn't wired up for it neatly. Another point to note is that transfer speeds are also dependent on the processing power of the Live Hub and we can tell you it's practically impossible to hit those Gigabit speeds.

On the management side of things, by entering the media player's IP address in the web browser on your networked home PC, you can access the Live Hub's Web UI. The Web UI allows you to manage the system status of the media player or even control the media player. Another nice touch is the ability to use TwonkyMedia server service to browse the files on your media player and play them back on your PC. You can also use the TwonkyMedia server to upload a file from your PC to your media player.

Live Testing

Now on to the part where most of you are waiting for: how it performs.

The player took about six seconds to reach its home screen once we switched it on. Reasonably snappy. Once the player was ready, we tested streaming video by using the YouTube service provided. Some videos would not load due to restrictions by the content owner to prevent it from playing on the TV. But the videos that weren’t restricted played back without a hitch with sufficient buffer time, and you can zoom in and out if you find that the video is too pixelated when the player automatically stretches it to fit the screen. We tested some random YouTube videos and none caused the player to hang.

We then went to test the video playback capabilities of the player for which it would be most used for. Fortunately, it was able to play most of the popular video formats on the market (the full list can be seen on the ), but be warned that the player is unable to play RMVB and FLV files (at the time of publishing this article). Video quality was good, with no jitters when watching 1080p resolution videos. Of course we should not forget that video quality is also dependent on the video source itself. Fast forwarding videos presented no problems, and the function was pretty quick and nifty.

For videos with subtitles, you are given an option to change the size and color of the subtitles. You are also given control over adjusting the subtitle position as well as selecting the type of encoding for the subtitles.

So to Conclude…

The design of the WD TV Live Hub, though typical of such media devices, is relatively slim and its black design will fit in well with most of your home A/V equipment. If we were to take a look at its functions; the Live Hub is a capable media player that doesn’t skip a beat displaying 1080p videos, though it has no love for RMVB and FLV files (at the point of publishing this article). The user interface is fairly easy to navigate, though you might spend some time looking for playback or interface options that are hidden beneath sub-menus.

The lack of Wi-Fi connectivity is a tad disappointing and while the Gigabit Ethernet feature looks good on a Powerpoint slide, it's unlikely to approach the full potential of its specs from our testing. Having 1TB of storage built-in is useful for some consumers, but the difficulty of upgrading the storage could be a turn-off for the more tech savvy user.

The WD TV Live Hub is priced at S$319 and overall, it is a capable media player that should meet your media needs. However, it is a bit on the pricey side and for those who can do without the built-in storage, there are cheaper alternatives that are just as capable. The good thing to note is that the Live Hub has set quite a high bar in the design and usability aspects, hence other alternatives may not match up in these areas.

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