Today we take a look at the Western Digital WD TV HD Media player. The WD TV HD Media Player is a device about the size of an external hard drive that plays A/V content from USB storage media. The WD TV HD Media player is optimized for the WD "My Passport" line of hard drives but it will work with other USB devices (we'll discuss this later). The player supports 1080p for...

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Hi. Your review makes it sound like it's limited to Stereo, and can't do multichannel at all.

I realize that there's no internal DD5.1 decoder internal to the unit, but so what? If you plug a TosLink cable from the unit into a Receiver, don't you get full multichannel sounds that way? If not, then why not, because all it should have to do is pull the bits from the bitstream and feed them to the receiver. This is confusing.

Thanks!

- Tim

Hi Tim,

You are correct! If the file is encoded with a Dolby Digital sound track the receiver will do the decoding and thus you will get 5.1 audio. When we did the original review we thought our test material had a 5.1 sound track. It did not and what made us a bit more confused was the following statement by WD:

AAC/Dolby Digital decodes in 2 channel output only.

That statement combined with the fact that we could only get two channel audio out of it led us to believe that the device was down mixing to two channels. We subsequently found that out test material was improperly encoded. We later reran the tests with a properly encoded xvid file and sure enough our receiver found a 5.1 audio track.

Our website was updated to reflect this. The issue here is that the review was given to HDTV Magazine quite sometime ago and it had the errant information. When I was asked to approve the final write-up this fact slipped past me.

I hope this post clears this up.

Thank you for your feedback and for listening to our show!
Ara

Ara,

thanks very much for confirming my thoughts, clearing this up here, and revising your website.

With this caveat lifted, I think that makes the WD player an even more attractive option.

- Tim

I have my WD Media Player plugged in using a Fiber TosLink cable from the unit into a Receiver; in the system settings you can change it from Stereo to Digital. I recently had a .mp4 H264 AAC movie hi bit rate but for some reason the sound did not work; however, I switch the system to stereo and the file played fine....sure not in 5.1 but at least it worked.

I loved this little box and it plays most formats...


Bob

Several premium channels, such as 5-Star Max, Cinemax, and HBO-S have been discreetly showing a lot of the Universal
monster cannon in hd in the past few months. (all of the Karloff Frankenstein films; the 2 best Wolfman films, Creature from the
Black Lagoon, Incredible Schrinking Man, etc.) Does anyone know if that studio will ever re-release these, perhaps as a big box
in Blu Ray? Some 20th Century Fox classic titles in early Technicolor have also surfaced in hd, but are often not flagged as
such in program logs. It seems, when the film is not in a 16x9 ratio, the program description shows standard def, even though
the picture is true 1080i hd.