WD TV Live Hub (1TB)

 I have have many homemade movies on my NAS. Actually I had several NAS devices over the years. However, I have a TV that does not allow stream from my NAS. So, I had to find a reasonable solution for that problem. As simple streaming device would be the solution. I did again a bit of screening on Internet on what the wise people tell and recommend. The WD Live Hub came off pretty good. Good value for money as they said. Actually, compared to apple TV, it is extremely cheap

When I bought it, I thought the 1TB hardisk is unnecessary, but as it turned out very essential. My first NAS did not have the bandwidth to stream HD movies, so I had to copy them over to the Hardisk for playback performance reasons. With my second NAS, that was not the problem, but I found out that I have too many switches in my network. 3 between my NAS and the WD Live Hub, one of which is 10/100kb, that also quite often results in poor connectivity for HD videos. I had to put in that small crappy slow switch, which I still had lying around, because the WD Live Hub doesn’t have WiFi! That is indeed also a (small) short coming. This is easy to fix, but have been too lazy to change that.

Note: I have a very strong filosophy on the usage of WiFi. Use Wifi only for portable devices or in case really no other choice. For all more or less fixed devices, put in real CAT5 or 6 cabling to your switch. The more devices you have on your Wifi, the more they need to share, and reduces bandwidth, unless you put in an expensive high capacity and multiple access points in your home.

Copying from a PC or another device to the WB Live Hub, is as easy as copying any file over the network. Very nice and easy! And via the USB port on the device you can also add additional Harddisks. Very nice feature too.

Anyway, why I am explaining this, is that this 1TB Hardisk has been put there for a good reason and I am happy Western Digital put it in there!

The interface via the remote on the TV is pretty simple. Not the best, but OK. It has a lot of additional features, which I have not been using at all. Witch is OK.

What is annoying, if you have a lot of movies or pictures (lot of files), it quite often needs to “rebuild the library”. This may even take half an hour to an hour. Imagine you have just finished editing a movie, you copy it over to the WD Live Hub, and then when you switch it on start watching, it suddenly starts rebuilding the library for the next hour! – irritating!!

Also, after I bought the Google Cast, the usage of the WD Live Hub has been fully reduced to play home made movies only. Streaming Netflix, watching pictures, streaming YouTube or other stream services, I rather do directly from my phone or iPad and cast it to Google Cast.