The Western Digital TV Live Hub is a TV for advanced users who wish to view files in HDTV. It does not have integral Wi-Fi in it and is more costly than the Apple or Roku TV.
Design and Features
The Digital TV Live Hub is a compact device; it is 1.25 inches tall, 7.8 inches wide and 5.9 inches deep. It has a shiny black finishing and it looks very attractive. It includes a remote control and a set of AV cables in red, white and yellow colors. Its interface is simple and elegant and it offers a very lively performance. The overall look of the TV is impressive but it becomes intricate when you start adding a group of files to the system.
You can either choose the default theme or customize the screen background with your own images. The 1 TB hard drive of this set makes it more costly than the Roku and the Apple TV although they have wireless connectivity when this set doesn’t. It is a very attractive offer for those who have a lot of multimedia content to play. With the help of Live Hub, wide types of playback file formats are supported, these include still image, video and audio files MP4, MOV and MKV. The Live Hub can also support onscreen keyboard and also USB PC keyboards.
The videos, images and music that are stored in the device can easily be gushed to any DLNA/UPnP-compatible products; this also includes PCs and game consoles. The Live Hub not only supports these products but also includes support to PC running software such as Twonky Vision. It also has the ability to access iTunes software that is running on your PC networked with the Live Hub.
You will find two USB ports in the Live Hub and these allow you to transfer various types of content from your camera (also Flip Video camcorders) and external hard drives. There is one unfortunate aspect of the Live Hub that it does not allow you to create or rename folders on the internal drive. Also it does not enable you to arrange your content, it would have been great if it did allow you to arrange and sort your huge amounts of content. The transferring procedure is not a disappointing factor as the Live Hub showed to transfer videos, images and multimedia files easily from both the Flip Video and the external hard drive except that it took a little long to transfer the larger files.
Conclusion
Although the Western Digital TV Live Hub has a few inadequacies, it is not a bad deal after all and you will find yourself liking the WD TV Live Hub. This product would have been a four starrer if it had integrated Wi-Fi capability in it and it would have surely been a strong killer of the Boxee Box. This product will be great for those techie people out there who have managed to put in their desired media files in it and will be sensible for them to purchase, as it also has a 1 TB hard drive.