Western Digital WD TV Live Hub review

We’re big fans of Western Digital’s media players. The WD TV and WD TV Live have both won awards from us for their diminutive designs, slick interfaces and wide format support. With little reason to mess with a great product, Western Digital has instead created something a little bit different, the WD TV Live Hub.

This sleek slice of consumer technology is certainly designed for living room use. Like its predecessors, you can stream media files to it across a wired network from a PC, laptop or NAS. However, the Live Hub also contains a 1TB hard disk, so you can store files locally; plus it acts a media server, so you can share those files to other devices on your network.

We plugged in the Live Hub and it set itself up with no problems, automatically detecting our TVs resolution, setting up a network connection and alerting us to a new firmware update. The only thing we had to do was change the time zone to UK time.

It then scanned the USB hard disk we had plugged in for media files, and asked if we’d like to sync the files with the internal drive – you can select either all files or supported files only. You can also choose to sync files with a Windows shared folder over the network connection, and thanks to a Gigabit Ethernet port, this won’t take forever. Alongside that port are HDMI, component, composite and optical S/PDIF outputs. There are two USB ports, one front and one rear, for connecting external storage devices.

There’s something terribly seductive about the Live Hub, the menu system (called Mochi) is colourful and easy to navigate, with a stylish font and simple animated icons. The device itself is a brilliant piece of minimalist design, and yes, you can turn of the illuminated Western Digital logo on the fascia if you want.

The main menu is horizontal scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen, leaving the rest free to display wallpaper of your choice (some very attractive landscapes are included to pick from or you can use your own photo). The video music and photo selections inform you how many new files have been synced to the device.

You can browse all your photos by date, filename or rating, or simply navigate by folder. You get 12 thumbnails on screen, and there’s plenty of slideshow options. Music can be browsed by album, track, genre and artist; plus there’s support for numerous playlist formats. You get 12 album thumbnails onscreen at once.

Video playback support is comprehensive, with all the codecs, containers and subtitling options you could want. You can scan through footage at up to 16x speed, or skip to a desired time by entering it numerically. Resume playback is supported, and files get a little icon to show this is available (also great for reminding you which episode you’re on). We had no complaints with quality, from standard definition home movies up to 1080p Blu-ray quality footage.

The 1TB hard disk isn’t huge by modern desktop standards, but it’s a lot bigger than many laptop disks. It’ll hold a lot of media files: even if you have 100GB of music (around 3,000 albums) and 50GB of images (about 12,500 photos), that would still leave 850GB for video (around 85 HD feature films, or almost ten times that number in standard definition).

You can access Facebook using the Live Hub – it looks great and works well. You can browse through photos, check up on your friends, and add status updates. The Live Hub supports USB keyboards for the latter, though navigation involves switching back and forth between the keyboard and the remote, as the backspace button doesn’t always mimic the remote’s back button. Speaking of the remote, it’s an excellent design, with a moulded rubbery underside and clearly labelled controls.

Other services include Flickr for photos, Live365.com for internet radio, and of course YouTube. All these are navigated using the same horizontal-scrolling menu system, which was responsive. There’s all the options you‘d expect, so you can login and mark favourites, search for content or browse top-rated picks – the only real downside is a lack of HD support in YouTube.

As well as playing locally stored content, you can stream media files to the Live Hub from PCs or NAS devices with UPnP support, it will also see Windows shared folders. Alternatively, you can stream files from the Live Hub to other devices in your home, say a DLNA-enabled TV or a games console. There’s also iTunes server support, so the Live Hub appeared as a shared device in iTunes on our PC, and we could play music from it.

One small concern is that the WD TV used 8W of power, even when in standby mode, probably due to the fact that it can still act as a server in this state. If you care about every watt you’ll want to turn it off at the mains overnight.

It’s a great device, but we’re not convinced that the Live Hub is a must-buy for everyone. Most people store their media files on their PC or laptop. This provides easy organisation of your files via Windows, and you can then stream them to a media player for viewing on your TV. If you want to store files on your network, then a NAS is the best option, and again streaming you can stream files to a media player in the living room.

The Live Hub combines streaming and network storage in one device. If you just have laptops in your home, and no desktop PC, then it would be a decent repository for all your media files, making them both available to view on your TV and still accessible from your roving laptops. In the end it’s the slick menu system, relatively large hard disk, breadth of features and stylish hardware that make this our ultimate media streamer – and all at a surprisingly reasonable price.