Western Digital has quietly revealed the Elements Play on their site, which combines pared-down playback features of the
WD TV series with up to 2TB of internal storage right out of the box. It's about time, considering competitor LaCie has offered integrated drives in its
LaCinema line for more than a year, though we wish WD would have included the Netflix streaming capabilities of the
WD TV Live Plus here -- or any streaming at all, for that matter. If an unconnected box with 1080p playback via HDMI and fabulous codec support (including Monkey's Audio!) is appealing to you though, then this latest offering might be worth your while -- especially if it's priced in line with its "value conscious" featureset, a fact we haven't been able to verify. To be competitive, it'll have to cost below LaCie's
LaCinema Classic HD, which throws in UPnP / DLNA server support on top of similar features for as little as $229. If you're curious, find the user's manual (including a full codec list) at our more coverage link.
[Thanks, Steve]
posted August 9th 2010 1:34AM
I think I much prefer WDTV + external drives, far more practical.
@Almo
For a home setup, yes, but I would like something like this as well because a) I travel a lot and this would work great for a hotel room where you don't want to bring along several devices and loads of cables and b) I like to bring my movies around to a friend's house sometimes - again a lot easier with just one box.
@tonicboy
there has to be a 3.5" drive in there, so it's going to be bigger and heavier than a WD live plus either an external 2.5" or a flash drive. if travel's your concern, most cellphones and ipods plus a charging dock can already do the trick, not to mention the computer you'd presumably have in your bag already. for long-term use at home, note that there is no USB port, and thus no easy expansion beyond the 2TB--which won't last as long as you might think, especially for people who want to archive VOBs or HD content. i think stacking them and swapping the connectors would be an awkward solution.
@m66 Look again, it does have a USB port. That was actually my first concern as well.
@huxuecan What the fuck?
@WilliamH
Seriously. Unconnected == uncompelling.
@CRA1G There was a comment earlier that was deserving, he responded to that not the main article. I guess it got deleted.
It would be nice if WD would resolve the annoying lip sync issue in their existing products first. A very annoying bug in an otherwise excellent product (WDTV live).
@Rivella
Yes I had that same problem which lead me to dump my WDTVs for something more reliable (see below)..
@Rivella was it encoded with Handbrake? Handbrake has issues when you set it to auto for the framerate of the encode. A lot of the lip sync issues go away if you hardset the framerate (23.976 for film and 29.97 for ntsc material).
@Rivella
Mine has the same issue and it's really annoying. It mostly happens when playing HD videos, no problem with the SD stuff.
@WilliamH Spam
wtf is monkey's audio?
@Blazeitup Lossless audio, like FLAC.
I dumped both my WDTV drives and have eGreat EG-R1 and EG-R2a now.. Much more reliable than the WDTVs which often had trouble with dropping out of audio/video sync and HDMI problems with both my TVs..
The pdf manual says support for 1920x1080p up to 30fps. Does this mean it will output at 24fps natively to tvs that support it?
Netflix streaming capabilites?
Get real. This WD Live series of products were created for people like me who illegally download 720p and 1080p mkv's, and this gave us an outlet to play them on a tv effectively and efficiently whilst supporting most audio formats out there.
@dedparrot Things like this should try to hit a wide range of people who want to play digital media (pirated movies or netflix) alike. That's just good business.
@dedparrot The interesting thing is people who are downloading lots of stuff are generally more tech savvy that most (e.g. newsgroups and the like are not particularly mainstream). And they are exactly the type of people likely to have high expectations of a device.
I personally have gone through WD TV (original), WD TV Live (now with added N dongle) and XBMC on a Revo (best choice for me).
I'm just worried the product is targeting a market that doesn't exist. The vast majority of people can't get the CONTENT to use these devices. If only pictures and music they want it for, there are much better options that this.
Personally I'd rather spend that same money and build an XBMC settop box with a Asus Aspire Revo nettop. Far more functionality and supports whatever codecs you want it to.
@mortis2600 I'd have to agree with you on this one.
I get the point in the market for this box (I bought the first WDTV), as it's neat to have something that doesn't require advanced setup (I've spent like 100 hours getting my XBMC box setup just the way I want), but I don't understand why WD doesn't create a hybrid of WDTV and WD Elements, a box with a harddrive AND an Ethernet port.
For me, it doesn't make sense to have to plug this to a computer everytime you need to fill it with new movies .. and WDTV has no internal storage, so you need an external HD besides the box itself.
Reasonable pricing on this is not a coincidence, since we all know a new TV top box will be coming soon for Apple in September including FaceTime on the TV. YEAH baby!!!
The biggest reason I wouldn't buy this is the lack of DTS audio support, especially in MKV files. And I also agree. The Live version with a USB powered drive is the way to go.
Understand that there are a small percentage of younger viewers who download a lot of their content off the internet who might be interested in this. However, given the number of similar media players I can't imagine its a good market to be in.
What I'm waiting for, what we're ALL waiting for, is an over the top media streamer. With the first checkbox being Hulu. And yes, via a full browser if that's what it takes. If you can't do Flash, if you can't do Silverlight, if you can't do MP4, then just go home.