Product Spotlight – WD TV Mini

Good afternoon all, hopefully this week’s been treating you well, but if it hasn’t there’s always the consolation of it being nearly over, that may help cheer you up. Anyway, for those who don’t follow the blog too closely, you may not already familiar with our Product Spotlight posts; they’re basically a space for the Komplett.ie staff to give one recommendation during the week on a product we think you guys might like.

Click through to see our page for the WD TV Mini

This week, our spotlit product for this week is the Western Digital TV Mini. It’s something people have asked about both on Twitter and via email a fair bit; it seems there was already a bit of buzz in the AV crowd that had initially developed around its predecessor, the still very fine indeed WDTV HD Media Player.

Of course, the newer Mini does boast much of the same functionality as the older, well-liked WD TV HD Media Player. Both play video from a USB storage device, most likely you’ll want to use a nice big external drive for this, but there are times when it’s equally handy to just plug in a USB stick and play directly from that.

How To: Get Your Digital Media to Your TV

We get asked a lot about getting digital media from a PC or a piece of large-scale digital storage directly onto a nice, big display. Generally, these questions come from people looking to get their high-definition content onto their HDTV. With that in mind, we’re going to go through a few of the different ways to get some content from your PC to your TV without any big headaches.

We’ll start with dedicated devices and then work from there, but basically there are about three or four fairly easy ways to get your video library from your hard drive to your TV without burning a mountain of DVDs, which is (let’s face it) both awkward and honestly feels a bit transient.

Dedicated Media Player:

The first option, by far the easiest in terms of technical skill needed to get everything together, is to just pick up a dedicated media player. The whole thing needn’t take longer than the time it takes to copy across all of your media, though the down side is that you’ll need to sort yourself out with both a media player and storage (if you go with some of the more popular media players).

By far the most popular media player we sell is Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player. It’s nice and simple, all you need to do is plug it into the display itself (HDMI ports would be ideal), plug in an external drive and you’re ready to go. The WD TV comes highly recommended and very well reviewed. Moreover, we’ve now got the Western Digital TV Mini too, though it outputs at DVD quality rather than in HD.

To quote the folks from TrustedReviews, “… while we’ve come across all sorts of variations on the ‘getting my multimedia stored on my computer to play on my living room TV’ theme, this is the first that has taken such a simple and effective approach”

Of course, you’ll need to grab some extra storage if you pick it up. Normally we recommend that people consider very carefully whether they’ll get the use out of a drive that will have to be plugged into a wall socket, but given the fact that the drive will likely be in near-continuous use in the same place, so it’s nowhere near as big an issue.

Product Spotlight – WDTV HD Media Player

Hey there all, hopefully your week is going as well as ours. For those of you who follow the blog regularly, you’re probably already familiar with our Thursday afternoon Product Spotlight post, but for those of you who don’t know about it there’s no reason not to go back over it a bit.

Basically, once a week we recommend a single product that one member of the Komplett staff has bought and is thought warranted a recommendation for those of you out there who might not otherwise encounter it.

Click through to see the WD TV product page

Western Digital’s TV is basically a small set-top box. It’s got its own remote, acts as a USB host and is capable of decoding and playing back high definition content. The interface is also far prettier than most of the other media players out there.

So, as you might have guessed, the idea is that you just plug in an external hard drive and it’ll let you play any of the media on the device out directly from the drive to a TV. It’s ideal for those of you who don’t feel like investing the time and effort in putting together a home theatre PC, but would still like the ability to play a library of videos of any size directly out to a display.

The WDTV HD Media player itself is €89 and you can see the extensive list of different formats it supports, as well as customer reviews, over on its product page.

Of course, for some this will necessitate picking up an extra external drive. If you’re a bit judicious you can use a drive you’ve got lying around, but frankly the amount of swapping a drive in and out it’ll cause can be a bit of a headache. If you’re looking for a nice external to just sit out of the way and take a full TB of media, then we recommend the Western Digital Elements, if only because you’ll be hard pressed to find an external 1TB drive for the same price and it’s a solid piece of kit.

Click through to see the product page for the Western Digital Elements

The Western Digital Elements is €77 and if you’re interested you should check out our product page for it. It’s been excellently reviewed, with all of the customers who’ve bought it and reviewed it giving it full marks