Western Digital WD TV Mini

Western Digital is already very popular, thanks to their super cool WD TV HDD based media player. It’s hard to be cynical about this concept, one in which you can play DivX, MP3s, VOBs and a lot more files directly off your HDD. This time they have come out with something smaller and more portable, known as the WD TV Mini. It is still an HDD fed media player, only much more compact. Now it’s our job to see whether compromise in space means compromise in features and quality, so let’s find out...

Just USB

Design and features

A perfect square makes up the external physiology, albeit with slightly rounded edges. The surface is matte finished on the top and bottom panels, with gloss black finish around the sides. It has a real good feel and build, even though it’s quite a lightweight product. The WD logo is on the side panel, looking pretty nice in its subdued form. The opposite side face has the connectors which are an Optical digital audio out, the DC power in, a composite and finally one composite out. The cables for these connections are supplied with the package. Overall the package comes with these cables, a universal power adapter, remote control, literature and an installation CD.

Very basic connections

The one main feature missing is HDMI out. As a corollary, this unit cannot play HD files and high def MKV files are not supported at all. Also, it does not come with its own storage, rather one has to plug in a pen drive, external hard disk, anything with USB Mass storage compliance. The files systems supported are mainly all the important ones in use today: FAT32, NTFS and HFS+.

This is one advantage this player has over normal DVD players with a USB in, most of them don’t support the latter two mentioned formats. What formats it can play is still quite vast when made in to a list: AVI (XviD, DivX, MPEG1/2/4), MPG, VOB, MOV and also RMVB( Real media files). In audio also we have lots of support including FLAC, APE, WMA, AAC, OGG, MP3, WAV etc. For pictures there is JPEG, GIF, TIFF and BMP. What this player can do, is upscale videos to 1080i, via the component, so there is at least some candy there.

With its remote

Performance

We plugged in WD passport external 160 GB drive( you can use any brand). You are greeted by a simple and easy to use Home page, which is quite attractive to look at even through its simplicity. The first thing one must do is go to settings and change the output to either 720p or 1080i (60 Hz), as it's not set to these by default. Here we can take the opportunity to praise the remote too, as it’s responsive and quite well built, not to mention it’s hard to lose. This is important, as there is no button on the actual unit, not even an ‘on’ button. Thus we have to rely on the remote.

We saw a stored Love Aaj Kal promo, (brickbats in comment section, that’s the only RMVB file I could find), along with downloaded trailers of Avatar and Inglorious Basterds in AVI, coded in Standard Definition DivX. We tried an MKV file, though the player politely turned us down.  Besides we had some test images which we viewed. The menu response is pretty fast, and when file names are listed, a handy preview is displayed on the right side. This preview also loads up quick.

Doens't look too bad

Overall there was not much loss in quality in terms of color reproduction and detailing, even in motion video the playback was very smooth, no skipping and coughing of frames. Thus performance wise this player definitely does well in video. Moving onto audio, we played Best of the Police FLAC rips along with some techno MP3s. The audio also has no real audible issues in terms of frequency output, but just as a subjective hunch I felt the sound was a little boxed in, as in dynamic range was not expressed fully, even in the uncompressed file formats.

Conclusion

It costs Rs 6000. I would love to give this model a great score but some marks have to be cut. First things I feel the USP of these products is the ability to play HD files, through an HDMI out. This Mini doesn’t have it. There are TVs that play DivXs directly off the pen drive, and upscaling is really not a game I like to play, as in the end the TV does the upscaling to its native res no matter what. But still, it does whatever it claims superbly, and the build plus looks are great. It’s very portable too. Thus this one goes down the middle.