GO BUY ONE NOW!
That would be it. I am am probably one of the biggest advocates for the device, an incredible product for the price, that changed the entire way I view media and the way I access it. I positively love my Live HUB and cannot even imagine life without it. House on fire? I'd probably grab the HUB and a few of my external drives leaving the rest of my belongings to go up in smoke. Devotion or insanity? Read on and decide.
But an article where I just tell you how much I love a product would not really be very helpful or interesting in any way, so instead I’ll relate a story of how I chose to go in the direction of buying a WD Live HUB, and then show you some screen shots so you can really see what using this is like. I have read many a review that simply describes the capabilities of a product, but that won't give you the real feel for how you as an end-user would use it at your home. Hopefully seeing screen shots of my implementation of the Live HUB from my TV Screen will give you that perspective, and possibly realize what you are missing.
For the past two years I have been proclaiming the virtues of Western Digital media players. Any of my friends, as well as colleagues and the random person I have conversed with at a social event can attest to this. Why am I such a huge advocate for a piece of hardware? Well, I use my HUB every day, for all my audio and video needs. It is running constantly running in my home, from my first cup of coffee in the morning till it gets shut off when I go to sleep. Essentially unless I am sitting in complete silence, the HUB is doing something.
My Search for a Media Player
It all started in early 2010.I had bookshelves full of DVDs, racks and racks of CDs, and I knew that I wanted a device that played all my media, video and audio. The era of flipping CDs and DVDs was over. Many of my friends had moved to ITunes and were picking their music through Apples menu system. I loved the concept, but ITunes was simply not for me. I had spent months researching media players online, and even been to a show put on by GDGT here in Seattle and spoken to vendors for several of the devices, some which had not even been released at that point.
I can’t recall all the devices that were out at that time, but had looked at Popcorn Hour, Boxie, Apple TV, Roku and a bunch of other media players, as well as thinking possibly about building an XBMC server. Some were basically Internet devices, some were for local media, some a hybrid of both. Today there are at least 25 of media players and devices out there, so I guess everyone has realized the demand for this type of hardware and wants in the game.
In the end I settled with WD for one reason; the amount of media formats it would play. I wanted my music in FLAC (We can discuss the merits of lossless audio vs. the ever popular mp3 format in a different article), and most of the devices could not read that format. WD’s boxes simply had the edge as far as a massive list of media formats for audio and video that it could read and play through my TV and Stereo. That alone became my deciding factor.
Live Plus
I purchased a WD Live Plus and began converting my media. Ripping my DVD collection to ISO files and my CDs to FLAC . The Live Plus was great, it did everything I wanted, played all my stuff, but the interface was pretty basic, and the box itself contained no hard drives, just two USB ports for you to connect your external drives. There was some Internet based apps, Youtube, TuneIn etc that I used, but mainly I now had a menu system for all my movies and music. Note that that there were (and still are) ways you can hack into your Live Plus using third party firmware to add services and a better UI. I played with this a bit but as the new Live HUB was about to come out I didn’t put much time into it. Okay, so a boring user interface, but I was up and running. My media was centralized, I could listen to any of my music or watch any of the movies and TV Shows I owned with the click of a remote. I was content to say the least. In fact, I was downright pleased with my setup.
Then Came the Live HUB
At that time, being so happy with my WD Live Plus, as well as the other WD stuff I had (a few 2TB external drives), I eventually considered myself a “WD guy”. I had tried and tested every little option on my Live Plus and I was participating in online user groups on the device to learn all the little secrets and techniques for real power usage of the box. There was no question that I was going to upgrade to the newest device from them when it was released. Did I wait in line the first day it was released? Hell no! Those of you who know me personally can attest to me being a research geek when it comes to technology. I may run out and buy a piece of furniture on a whim without even measuring to see if will fit in the space I have in mind for it. But technology, not me. I read the reviews, listen to other users in the support forums and in general over analyze my purchase whether it be a $5 device or an expensive piece of hardware. So I gave it about a month after the release before I jumped into the pool.
Getting the Live HUB was such and improvement I was blown away. A killer interface that could be modified with themes written by third parties, a 1TB internal drive as well as the two USB ports, and although this may seem minor, you could finally modify the screensaver. Once you have had the WD logo bouncing across your screen for hours at a clip while you listen to music, anything better would have done, but I could now choose my own pictures and the rate at which they switched to the next one. With each firmware upgrade, more Internet applications have been added (27 to date), including recently a SlingBox client. For $200 this is a hell of a deal. I have read complaints on message boards (people like to complain about everything), but for me this has been an amazing product. I have all my music and movies available via menu, indexed and searchable, access to a slew of internet applications that I actually use like Netfix and Pandora & Spotify, with a great looking UI, all in a small foot print. I even have a wireless keyboard attached so I can easily type on the screen. I have added metadata for all my media so I can search for almost any aspect I am looking for. If I want to see a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, type in the search term and all my Hitchcock movies come up. Want a list of all songs by Rush, type it in and they pop up. F**’n Brilliant!
Why do you want this product?
I could go on forever about this, but let’s just list the features that you get by buying this $200 box
- Play all of your music
- Play all of your DVD rips and home video
- Display all of your pictures
- Play and use Internet applications and content
- Comes with a 1TB drive and two USB ports for additional storage, a keyboard etc.
- Connect to media anywhere on your network, other computers, NAS, and networked drives
- Search your media for specific songs, movies, actors using metadata
- Acts as a media HUB that other devices can access the 1TB drive when it’s in Stand-By mode
- Access other DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) media servers (PlayOn, Windows Media Center etc)
Is that enough for your $200? Damn straight it is. This takes all of the media you have, centralizes it, and makes it available through your TV and Stereo. That’s an awful lot for your money.
Okay, so enough if me waxing poetic about the product, let’s take a look at a few of the screens and options. From this you should be able to see what I have been talking about. Note that I am using the Black Mamba theme written by a coder named DeVicious. The standard theme is pretty nice, but this is by far my favorite of all the ones I have installed and played with. So, my screen shots look different than what a default WD HUB setup will look like. The functionality is all the same, just a modified user interface.
Main Home Screen
Here we have the main “home” screen. This is how you can get to each of the different media types, music, video, pictures, Internet Apps etc. Pretty self explanatory, use the remote; choose what you want to do.
When going to the video section (titled Home Cinema in this theme) is when "views" really come into play. You can essentially look at a list of what you have, or look at the covers, or in ‘Gallery Mode” see metadata about the movie that has been scraped using a number of third party applications that are freely available. Let’s take a look at a few of the available views that we can use to browse our movie collection. I have my movies broken down by genre, which is just a directory filled with movies of similar type. This is not necessary, you could just have all of them in one big folder, but for browsing I like this much better. Here we have my genres, or at least the eight that fit on the screen, and you can scroll left or right to get to more of them.
So for this article I chose “comedies”, and now we can take a look at these views I have been writing about. Views are different ways of looking at your list of available media. Essentially you get to choose how you would like to see your movies or music. For me, views are most important for browsing through my videos. The view bellow allows us to look at the movie covers. As we can only fit 16 on the screen, you have to scroll left or right to get to the next set of movies.
This next view is essential in list mode, whichever movie is highlighted, the cover is displayed in the right hand frame.
My Favorite View
And although there are a few other views, lastly I am showing you is my favorite, and the one I use the most called Gallery Mode. In this view we see the cover and metadata that has been scraped from IMDB and other sources. We get the synopsis of the movie, as well as the length, cast, director, format and even the IMDB rating. A fantastic way to browse through your collection. It's been over a year since I have implemented this view, and I am still blown away by the fact that I can do this.
And although there are a few other views, lastly I am showing you is my favorite, and the one I use the most called Gallery Mode. In this view we see the cover and metadata that has been scraped from IMDB and other sources. We get the synopsis of the movie, as well as the length, cast, director, format and even the IMDB rating. A fantastic way to browse through your collection. It's been over a year since I have implemented this view, and I am still blown away by the fact that I can do this.
And just so you don’t that this is only for movies, Gallery Mode works great for TV episodes as well.
On movie night, I used to browse through two bookcases full of DVDs. Now I scroll through my collection on the screen, can see the overviews and ratings while I choose, and can even click a few buttons on the remote and the HUB pulls up the official trailer from YouTube. Quite impressive.
If you have gone through the process of scraping the movie data and adding all the appropriate information, the search function becomes a real attribute. Without going through that work, you can search for a movies name, but the real power is in the metadata. With close to 1000 DVDs in my collection, search has become my friend. In the following screen captures, I have chosen to search by Director, and using my attached wireless keyboard I entered Kubrick, the director I am looking for. I get back a list of movies in my collection that he has directed. Wow! This is some amazing stuff if you have a lot of movies, TV shows or albums to search through.
Now that we have looked at the Movie / Video setup, let’s see how useful the HUB is for music. I have ripped all my CDs to the FLAC format, and put them in directories with the name of the album. I have gone through the process with a few third party tools of gathering the album covers and song titles etc and embedding them into the songs. I won’t go through all the views as we did for movies, but needless to say it is very similar. You can look at them by the album cover only, or by list view which is my preferred view to use for music. For the sake of this article, I am only going to show you the view that I use.
Here we see my albums in list view. When an album is highlighted, the cover is in the right hand panel. They are listed in the alphabetical order, so the naming convention I chose to use is Musician-Year-Album so I would also get chronological order.
Now we see what I the screen looks like while we are listening to an album. We see the songs, the album cover, as well as the song that is playing, and what song is coming up next.
With hundreds of albums and tens of thousands of songs, the HUB makes it easy to find and listen to whatever suits your mood at that time. Playlists are easy to make and read by the device, and your collection can contain songs in multiple different formats. As I said above, I use FLAC for everything, but if you have MP3s, WAV files, or a mixture of formats, the HUB will just chug along playing them all.
Internet applications was not the reason I bought this device, but as time has gone on, more useful applications have been written and also added to the HUB, and these days I find myself using them a good percentage of the time. There are many devices out there that are focused on Internet applications. I have a Roku XD, which is used mainly for this type of setup, but the HUB brings you the best of both worlds. The main players in online apps are mostly included, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook and Pandora. Also a bunch of lesser known apps for viewing movies (Vudu, Cinema Now), Web Based Video (Daily Motion, Comedy Time), Music (Shoutcast, Tunein and my favorite, Spotify) , as well as a bunch of stuff for sports and Photos. There is some pretty great stuff here, and with netfix and Hulu, you could conceivably drop your cable provider, although the addition of a PlayOn server to your network would certainly get you a lot closer to that. You can read about PlayOn in one of my previous articles but it basically is a server that gathers TV shows and web content from the Internet.
For me, I live off just a few of these Internet applications. Admittedly I prefer my Roku for Netflix and Hulu but for most other Internet applications the HUB is my choice. I really enjoy searching and watching Youtube videos on my flatscreen, I use TuneIn to listen to radio stations around the country, and Spotify to check out almost any new album or band I have interest in. Sound good? If so check out my article on Spotify; it’s a pretty great service.
Here is a screen shot of the main page for accessing the Internet applications. At the time of writing this article, there are 27 applications with more being added on a pretty regular basis. I won’t bother to show you each individual one for fear of bringing you to tears of boredom, but most of the interfaces to these apps are pretty good, similar to how you would use them on your computer, but now on your TV and Stereo.
With each firmware upgrade, Western Digital seems to be adding more Internet applications. I would guess this is as they can negotiate deals with the various providers. There are a few major ones lacking, most notably Amazon Video On Demand, but the majority of what I would want is there. You can easily lose a day or so just searching through all the available web based video applications.
The Rest
There are a bunch of other things the hub does, but for the sake of space, brevity (I think that ship has already sailed), and not putting up too many pictures, I'll just touch on a few instead of going into depth on them.
Pictures
Of course the HUB is a great way to view your pictures. You can setup a slide show on screen, show all of them, choose a single directory, or manually go through and pick a single picture to display.
Screen Saver
And what about that screen saver I was referring to above and why care? Setup the HUB to display pictures from a certain directory while it's on, decide the rate at which it changes the picture, and your 50 inch flatscreen TV becomes a huge picture frame. Great for home photos, but I personally love having full screen art on my TV that changes every 5 minutes. When you get bored of one set of photos, just download some more from the net, and change the directory.
Network Hub / NAS
One other feature that I love is that the HUB acts as a NAS (Network Attached Storage). You can shut it down completely, or run it in stand-by mode, making the 1TB drive available to your other computers, when it is essentially "off". You can then map drives from your computer to the HUB, using it as a backup storage device, or even access your media that sits on it from another device, such as my old Live Plus that now runs the TV and Stereo in the bedroom. Lots of stuff useful stuff you can do with the HUB as a network server.
The Technical Stuff
If you want some real details on this stuff, you can go to the WD site or follow the links in the resource section below but we’ll take a look at some of the basics so you can see how you would connect the HUB into your setup and what you can play or stream from it.
Connections
The HUB has a bunch of connection options to hook into your stereo and TV. The USB ports can be used for a variety of options, external drives, USB wireless keyboard (a must in my opinion), a WiFi adapter (I’d go with wired Ethernet if you can), your camera or video camera and I’m sure a host of other USB devices I cannot think of.
This is all on the back panel except for one of the USB ports which is on the front of the HUB.
| 2 USB ports | Composite Jacks |
| S/PDIF (optical) audio port | Component Jacks |
| HDMI port Connects to your TV’s HDMI port | Power Jack |
| Ethernet port |
Formats:
As I had said in the beginning of this article, I chose my first WD Device due to the amount of formats it can read and play, especially FLAC in my case. This is a huge advantage over other devices that the HUB competes with. I have a mix of video formats. Some DVDs I have ripped to ISO files, some I left in VOB style directories, and some I have compressed into AVIs. One of my video cameras takes MP4s, while another I have takes MOVs. Being able to read and play all of these formats is massively important to me as a user, and if you have media in various formats which most of is invariably do, you will care about this feature. Buy a media player that cannot read your home movies or half of your music collection, and that piece of hardware will end up collecting dust in closet somewhere. Here are the the supported formats form audio, video and pictures.
| Audio Formats | Video file formats | Image File Formats |
| MP3 | AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4) | GIF |
| WAV/PCM/LPCM | MPG/MPEG | BMP |
| WMA | VOB/ISO | JPEG (grayscale, RGB, YCbCy) |
| AAC | MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4) | TIF/TIFF (RGB) |
| FLAC | TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1) | PNG |
| MKA | MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264) | |
| AIF/AIFF | M2TS | |
| OGG | WMV9 (VC-1) | |
| Dolby Digital Plus | ||
| DTS |
Conclusions
It’s time. If you are still flipping CDs and DVDs, looking at your photos on your phone of computer, you need to be moving towards a fully integrated media center. Even if you have made the move to digitized music with an IPod dock, what about your movies, your pictures, all your internet apps? There are a lot of ways to do this, but for my money, Western Digital has figured it out. For $200, (many of us have run up bar tabs higher than that), you get the media player and the internal 1TB drive. The drive alone would cost you close to $100, so this is a pretty damn good deal. I use my HUB almost all day, every day. Music, Video, Internet apps essentially cover all my home entertainment. If you have read my articles on cutting the cable cord, this is the device that made it possible for me to do so.
The HUB can be used as a basic device. Plug it into your TV and Stereo, copy some files to the internal drive and you are up and running. On the other hand, you can change your themes, scrape metadata for your video and audio, add RSS feeds and a host of other more complicated tweaks. It’s all up to you, but just putting together a basic setup is pretty easy.
There is also a strong user community for the HUB and other WD devices. A great deal of what I know about this device, the everyday usage tricks as well as the power user info, I picked up from others in the community. If you are using a HUB or plan on buying one, I would highly suggest checking out the user forums.
Since choosing to use WD devices for my home AV needs, I really haven't tested a lot of other media players. I am sure that there are many all-in-one players out there that work great, but I have been so pleased with the Live HUB, I am sticking with the path I chose in 2010, and recommend it whole heatedly to anyone looking to move to an integrated system for all their media. From techno-phobic newbie to AV professional, the Live HUB will meet your needs.
Now, go buy yourself one of these boxes, and take your AV setup to the next level!
A Note Other WD Players:
One other note is that WD also make a variety of media players which are extremely similar to the HUB, but either do not come with the internal drive, have built in WiFi or other minor differences. If you have all your media already on a NAS or other network server, you might look into buying one of the options that does not have an internal drive.
Resources
Look Good. Thanks.
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