The bottom of the device has slots that allow the box to be wall mounted. For wireless connectivity, the box supports When the device starts up, there is a grid of icons pinned to the front page. To access your local content, there are icons for Music, Photos and Videos. For more apps, a click of the bell icon on the top right of the screen reveals all the services available for the WD TV. Clicking through to services brings you to over 80 apps.
Clicking a particular service like DailyMotion will launch the app. To pin it to the front page, you make it a favorite. The interface isn't pretty or full of unnecessary flourishes, but it gets the job done. Local content navigation is a highlight. Folders containing large numbers of files loaded somewhat slowly the first time, but the device creates an index file after that initial load, allowing for much quicker access the second and succeeding times.
I also appreciated the ability to change folder views from thumbnails to list view. The included remote is large and complex compared with the tiny clickers of most other set-top boxes.
It has the standard four directional buttons that surround a select button, but it also includes a number of dedicated buttons for functions including subtitles, audio, mute, search and eject.
The remote is a big clue to WD TV's intended audience: people with their own video libraries who are used to a degree of complexity. The main draw of the WD TV is its local and network video playback, and it performed admirably in our tests. Scrubbing through video playback and chapters was outstanding. Hitting the options button while the video played displayed information like bit rate and file size along with options to change aspect ratio, audio lip sync and even share a screenshot to Facebook or Twitter.
Photo slideshows and music files worked just fine as well. Mirroring a Windows 8. The latter approach is tidier, BUT, you will find that for many of your videos, this will mean an extra click as you drill down the folder structure to get to your movie. This all means that the best way to structure your library is to place all the films of each genre in the same folder. More on that later. If you do this, and name your films sensibly, this is not such a terrible design for the system.
Most people will create or download pre-prepared folder thumbnails for each folder to illustrate their genre. As I had 9 unique main genres, I decided to do it myself.
You may have some other top level categories that you will want to view as well as movies. For example, home videos and TV series. I have the latter, and so have shared a separate folder called TV. When we get to setting up the Shares on the SMP, all the shares will be seen in this top level menu, so it is a good idea to do a category thumbnail for each share using the steps above, and placing the resulting folder.
Yeah, I realise that will take a couple of readings, so here is pic of my movies folder with the movie folder. Ripping means copying. Now, my understanding is that ripping is not illegal if it is the copying of your own purchased DVD to be used for private consumption.
Current version is 9. The good news is that the Copy function confusingly not the Ripping function on the left of the main menu, is free to use. You get nagged about buying it, but currently nothing else stops you from using it. DVDFab End. After a few trials, I would recommend ripping large chunks of your collection first and encoding second, as once you have your DVDs on your hard drive, you can encode them in a big batch, and not have to keep tied to the PC.
You can stream the ripped files to your SMP without encoding, and it will detect the movie and play it. However, I.
Firstly, as already discussed in section 2. Not just for ease of locating movies, but also, because all these rips will have similar file names, which will cause havoc if they are all placed into one folder. Secondly, these ripped files in vanilla format seem to stream really badly, particularly the larger Blu Ray files, and lead to stutters on the system. Thirdly, encoding saves bags of space. A typical DVD film rip will result in multiple files adding up to maybe 4 or 5 Gb.
Not good. This is a compromise that I have reluctantly accepted - I sometimes watch an encoded Blu-ray and know the quality could have been better…. The tool of choice on these forums and for good reason is Handbrake. When you go to your output folder - you will now have nicely packaged files - one per movie.
Move the files to your appropriate genre folders, and name them the proper film name ie not with dashes or whatever the DVD chose to call it , as this will help the SMP identify it when pulling down the metadata. Word of warning. There is an alternative free encoder called Freemake Video Converter. It has a much nicer user interface than Handbrake, but the resulting MKV files all stuttered when streamed.
I recommend you follow them to the letter. This is a slightly arcane process, but section 6 of the manual describes the process well. This is important metadata info on each film, with descriptions, actor lists and those pretty backdrops. If you navigate to the main menu, you will see a message at the top telling you that this is happening.
The reason is that the metathumb files somehow over-ride the folder. The only solution is to rename every metathumb file as a jpg, which, for a large library, can be a right PITA! My solution is to create a DOS command batch file which does everything though it pushed by understanding of DOS to the extreme!
I guess the experienced users will cry out for thumbgen, but this is a beginners guide :. Well on my system, they take just a bit too long to load up when I am searching for a film.
They are pretty and useful for showing off the system to envious friends, but for day to day use, I have had to compromise. My solution is to press the Yellow button on the remote and change the view from the default one with the pretty backdrops to one with the nine folders. Why that one? Because I have nine main genres. I recommend it. Movie Library. Sci Fi.
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