Western Digital TV

Shawn Philip Nelson

Shawn Philip Nelson

Veteran
Western Digital has released a device called the WD TV. It's a $100 set top box with a very simple concept: it takes input from USB (thumbdrive, harddrives, flash via adapters, etc) and then outputs it up to 1080p resolution out an HDMI port to a TV! It even has a remote control! I ordered one on Amazon for $99, I'll report back on how it goes.

Think through this, this would be ULTIMATE dailies device. Amazon even has it for $99. You just have the DIT make 1k, 720p or 1080p h264 files and dump then on any USB drive and bam, you can watch them all on any TV or projector system that takes HDMI.

Plus, distribution. Now we could walk into any theater that has a projector taking HDMI (and alternately if they dont, a blackmagic device converting HDMI to whatever format the projector wants) and you can now screen 1080p material anywhere.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=572

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc..._HD_Media.html
 
Now that is cool! Definitely keep us posted on how it goes - would also be the ultimate for watching the stuff from fests! I wonder what it does if you feed it some weird res like 360x480...
 
Dont quite a few cameras have a USB out? I wonder if you can use it just to go through and could use a field monitor?
 
Jim Brennan said:
I guess it's the "theoretically" part that gets me :-)
Click to expand...
Well, yes, but keep in mind that HDTV broadcasting only uses 19 megabits per second. And that's of MPEG-2! And that's only if they're using the entire bandwidth allocated; some broadcasts use even less so they can squeeze more channels in.

So as long as it could support around 20 megabits it should be good enough for quality that matches the very best broadcast HD. Blu-ray maxxes out at 48mbps, IIRC. So USB should be able to deliver up to 10 simultaneous streams of blu-ray HD (although, of course, that 'theoretical' means that it'd never happen). But it should certainly be able to handle one.

No way would USB be able to handle a full uncompressed HDMI data stream, but when run through MPEG-2 or AVC it should be plenty enough to handle HDTV.
 
So, would there be changes you should make in your compression to maximize that? It sounds like the same MPEG-2 encoding you do for DVD would be fine.
 
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