Western Digital TV Live Streamer

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Ray P
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#1 Western Digital TV Live Streamer

Post by Ray P »

I invested some of my monetary Christmas gifts in a Western Digital TV Live 'gadget'. Its now installed in the telly system so we now have Netflix and can view some videos and our photographs from the home server. It can also play music and I have used it's built in capability to playback stuff from the music server and the sound is really quite pleasant; the downside is that you have to have the TV on to be able to choose anything from the library and the interface isn't as slick as what I'm used to.

So, this morning I've been experimenting with using the WD as a DLNA music renderer, pushing music from JRiver Media Centre on the music server (located in the 'hifi room') and controlling things from my Android tablet. After experimenting with some of the DLNA settings in J River I've now got it working pretty consistently in terms of the streaming and control. It sounds pretty good too, though I'm less demanding of music on the telly system. Previously I was sending music from JRiver to my Denon home cinema amp but the DLNA implementation seemed to leave something to be desired as it constantly dropped off the network so a big improvement there.

Ray
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Ray P
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#2

Post by Ray P »

Well, it's been behaving pretty well so far, I had it running for a couple of hours without any hiccoughs earlier this afternoon.

The one thing I haven't managed to sort out is being able to use it with the TV turned off. This has to be something to do with the configuration of the WD device, probably an HDMI related configuration. If I turn off the TV monitor the sound stops, though I can still see music files are still being sent to the renderer.

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Ray P
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#3

Post by Ray P »

BTW, by shopping around I managed to pick up the gadget for £55 delivered.

Ray
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Ray P
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#4

Post by Ray P »

I spent another couple of hours trying out the 'gadget' again yesterday and I think I've now got all the config ironed out.

I can send music to it from JRiver MC without needing the TV on and with only an occasional signal disconnection; left it playing yesterday afternoon while I was out and it was still running when I got home a couple of hours later.

With the TV on I can also pull music from J River, via DLNA, though the interface to select music isn't as good as via JRiver.

Of course I can also use the gadget to view photos from our digital album, DVDs that I've ripped to the server hard disk and access services like Netflix and TuneIn (along with others that are of no interest to me, like Facebook).

All in all it's pretty good, especially when you consider the cost.

Ray
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Ray P
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#5

Post by Ray P »

Oh, I forgot to mention sound quality with respect to music playback. I have only used the WD TV Live through my home cinema amp via an HDMI connection. The sound, output as stereo rather than surround, is really quite pleasant and plenty good enough for the telly room as background or relaxed listening, but not in the league of my dedicated system, but that would be an unreasonable expectation. It's several years since I owned a squeezebox so I can't honestly give a view of where it pitches against something of that ilk.

However, I'm quite sure the sound would be better if I were to use the WD gadget's digital output into a decent standalone DAC. The digital output is optical only and I don't have a DAC so equipped so haven't been able to test this. My home cinema amp has an optical digital input though and I'll give that a try at some point.

I've had no problems with playback of 24bit 96KHz FLAC files. I have some 24bit 192KHz FLAC downloads on the server and will give them a try later.

Ray
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