• Thumbnail and list views - Browse your content by filename or by thumbnails of photos, album covers and movie cover art.
• Media Library - This unique feature lets you view all your media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives. You can view content by categories such as genre, album, artist and date. / Search - Search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename
• Create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music
• Movie viewing - Fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan; View subtitles - Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date
• Music - Fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat; Supported USB Device file systems: FAT-32, NTFS, HFS+ (no journaling)

Combined with a My Passport portable drive (sold separately), this player is the most convenient way to play HD movies or user-generated videos, listen to high-quality digital music and show high-resolution slideshows of your family photos on your TV. Also works with popular USB drives, and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices.
Designed for My Passport, works with many other USB storage devices - Play content from most popular USB drives,and digital cameras, camcorders, and portable media players that can be recognized as mass storage devices. Full HD video playback and navigation - up to 1080p - Experience the spectacular picture quality of HD video and crystal clear sound clarity of digital audio. Use the included remote control to navigate through your entertainment choices using our crisp, animated HD menus. Collect without limits - There's no limit to the size of your media collection; just add more USB drives for more space. Access two USB drives simultaneously - Two USB ports on the player let you connect two USB storage devices and access them simultaneously. Media Library feature aggregates the content on both drives into one list sorted by media type. HDMI and composite video connections - The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port lets you connect to the highest quality HDTV or home theater. Additional composite (RCA) outputs ensure compatibility with virtually all television sets. Hassle-free playback of HD movies, home videos, digital music, and photos on your TV

So far, we really like this. We've loaded more than 30 hours of captured video from our digital camcorder, thousands of photos, and thousands of songs and are enjoying them all on this. The inferface is easy, it recognized the 1TB USB drive we connected with no problem, and it's small and unobtrusive near the TV.
My 2 complaints are:
It supports AVI but apparently not DVI AVI. We've used Windows Movie Maker 2 to capture 30+ hours of DVI AVI from our camcorder and unfortunately, it wouldn't play them directly. Fortunately, it was easy to convert them all to MPEG with Nero.
Complaint #2: Installing the included conversion software caused all of my other video capture software to stop working properly, and even uninstalling it doesn't fix it. I had hoped to use it to batch convert large numbers of videos but it's really caused me headaches. If you do video capture from any kind of digital camcorder, I wouldn't recommend installing the included software. If you have a solution that already works, don't risk breaking it.
All in all, we're very happy with this.

Just needs to add support for some 6 channel audio encodes used in HD video, ac3 etc.

Would also be nice if it could transfer files from usb1 & usb2 so you could use a thumb drive to add files to a connected external drive.

Plays most everything I throw at it (have had to re-encode some audio).

If you have a lot of media files, the WD HD is a must.

[...]

Upon opening the box, I was surprised at how small the unit was. It is dwarfed by the Vantec HD dock as you can see in my test setup. Out of the box I had some trouble playing one .SRT subtitle file, and the subtitles started at the top of the bottom third of the screen. Also if there were more than one line to the subtitle the lines were spaced very far apart. Very distracting.

Imediately I checked the Western Digital website for a firmware update. Indeed there was. Ver. 1.01.02 dated 12/2/08. After updating the problems I was haver were fixed. The subtitle that wouldn't play worked perfectly. And, the subtitles were at the bottom where they should be and the line spacing was corrected. I also noticed some additions to the setup menu, including subtitle size.

So far all the files I have tested work fine, including the .mkv's which I really wanted this unit for. I am very pleased with the operation and menu system. The only improvement that I can see so far is that they need to give an option to change the subtitle color. The only option right now is white, which can be hard to read on bright scenes. The option of yellow would be very nice. Of course hardsubbed video subtitles look great.

WD also offers GPL code for third party developers, which I find awesome. (Sony please take a hint.)

I'll give it 4 stars only because it needs subtitle color options. I am sure this will happen in future firmware updates.

After my Iomega 500GB Multimedia Driver died on me I decided to shop for something more reliable I was surfing and found out about the WD TV HD Media Player since I already have a 1 TB WD External drive I thought I'd buy this device to connect it thorough and watch my stuff on my Plasma everything worked fine video, sound, picture quality are excellent it even played some files that didn't work with my previous Iomega device the remote control is comfortable and works fine even from distance the reason why I'm giving it 4 stars not 5 is because when I turn off the WD TV HD Media Player my external WD External drive stays on! This device is better used with an external notebook hard drive, anyhow I think it's a good device and I recommend it I also hope that my review is helpful.

First of all, this product works almost flawlessly out of the box. It played every avi, divx, xvid, mpeg, and iso I had stored on my Mybook 500gig. The only issue had was turning the power off during playback. This causes the unit to lock in the off position and you must unplug to reset. It plays 720P video with ease. Digital AC3 sound is also a plus. I also love the menu structure and how simple it was to navigate.
To those having issues, I must suggest the following actions:
- Learn how to rip with proper software
- Read the website and make sure you stick to a supported format
- Go to the website and download the firmware update
- Try to be a little less nitpicky with a $100 video player