This looks nice...

[fatboyslimfast]

Just add a USB disk and you are away... HDMI and optical out, and supports FLAC and AAC...

Western Digital WDTV...

Apparantly going to retail for somewhere around the £80 mark...

 

[John Duncan]

Genius. Now where was that bloke who wanted just this very thing......

 

[Clare Newsome]

Nice one.

We got no UK release on this, so i'm not sure when we'll see it over here.... We'll chase it up!

 

[fatboyslimfast]

No probs Clare! Apparantly should be on general release some time this month...

 

[John Duncan]

If only someone would make one that looks like hifi....

 

[fatboyslimfast]

You could buy a dead primare cd player, rip the insides out, and put the WD inside the case behind the front panel...

 

[John Duncan]

fatboyslimfast:You could buy a dead primare cd player, rip the insides out, and put the WD inside the case behind the front panel...

I have considered this - or even something I can fit an airport express, dacmagic and iPhone touch front panel in. Now where's that soldering iron.......?

 

[Gerrardasnails]

fatboyslimfast:Just add a USB disk and you are away... HDMI and optical out, and supports FLAC and AAC...

Western Digital WDTV...

Apparantly going to retail for somewhere around the £80 mark...

How do you know what it supports FBSF? It does look a nifty piece of kit though. A couple of issues for me. Obviously you need an external drive - I have one of the WD drives shown in the picture - they are tiny as well. Problem here, they cost extra and they are not that reliable. A 500gb one will cost about £80. Another issue for me is that to add music, films, etc., you have to unplug and transfer data and then plug back in again. I much prefer the concept of the Linksys I'm using. It constantly streams your files without you doing a thing. I got mine for £150 from pc world.

 

[Anonymous]

Neat but an odd solution as most of WD's competitors have a one box solution to this. Shame there is no WiFi or ethernet capability.

I'm beginning to think as buyers we're being manipulated to buy 2 or 3 bits of kit where one would do.

 

[John Duncan]

welshboy:Shame there is no WiFi or ethernet capability.

Indeed, for NAS users......

 

[belker]

Anyone ever get one of these? Any good?

 

[Anonymous]

Ordered one from Amazon the other day - hopefully I'll have it by the weekend.
I looked at the Linksys media centre extender as an alternative (PC World are doing them at £110), but my only PC is my laptop and I don't really want to have to fire it up everytime I want to listen to some music. It looks like a good idea if you've got a desktop PC you leave running as a file server, preferably over a hard-wired network, but doesn't really suit my needs.
With the WD player I can just leave it permanently connected to my AV system and hook up a spare hard disk with all my music and a few videos loaded onto it. I'm hoping that the sound quality will be decent enough - using lossless files and the DAC in my Sony amp there's no reason why it shouldn't. If the picture quality's good then I'll probably get a 2nd drive and transfer a few of my favourite DVD's onto it. It even outputs DD 5.1 audio off DVD files straight to the digital out.