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Performance
The WD TV started up pretty quickly. It took about 3 seconds to initalize. We then tested the WD TV with two portable WD hard disk drives - the 1 TB Western Digital My Book Home Edition and the 160 GB Western Digital My Passport. Here are the results :
Portable Drive Model |
Time Taken To... |
||
Detect & Initialize |
Completely Scan |
||
WD My Book (1 TB) |
5 minutes 49 seconds |
6 minutes 49 seconds |
|
WD My Passport (160 GB) |
1 minute 8 seconds |
4 seconds |
|
The WD TV took an extraordinarily long time to scan through the My Book. That is quite understandable due to the drive's large capacity. However, we have no idea why it took the WD TV so long to detect its presence and initialize the drive. In all, we had to wait about 12.5 minutes before we can even view the contents of the My Book drive.
The smaller 160 GB My Passport drive, on the other hand, loaded real quick. Detection was almost instant but initialization still took about a minute. The scan through was quick though at just 4 seconds. The drive was accessible in less than 1.5 minutes.
Format Support
The WD TV supports a myriad of common audio formats, including AC-3 which is more famously known as Dolby Digital. However, there is one major audio format it does not support - DTS (Digital Theater System). The WD TV only provides a S/PDIF port for you to pass through the signal to an external DTS decoder.
In our opinion, this is a major disadvantage of the WD TV because many videos out there are encoded with DTS audio. If you attempt to play such videos, you will be greeted by stony silence because the WD TV is not capable of decoding DTS audio tracks. We hope WD will consider adding DTS support to the next upgrade of the WD TV.
The WD TV also does not support the AVCHD format used by HDD or SD camcorders, at least not the format used specifically by Panasonic's SD camcorder. So, you can't just play your home videos directly from these camcorders. You will need to convert them using the provided ArcSoft MediaConverter software.
Custom Slideshows
The WD TV does not support custom slideshows with pre-arranged (or even randomized) soundtracks. Basically, for music playback during slideshows, you need to start the music manually before running the slideshow. It would be great if you can at least set a particular song to start with each slideshow. WD should consider adding that to the next firmware upgrade.
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