As previously mentioned, I own a WDTV Live and I’m overall very happy with it. There’s some minor issues that tarnish an otherwise beautiful little product, but when pushed I will contend that it’s an excellent gadget that any geek would probably enjoy.
However, lately I’ve been kicking around some ideas regarding what could make it into a truly perfect device.
Without further ado, here’s the list:
YouTube in High-Definition
When I bought this thing it could play Youtube-movies in HD. In later firmware-revisions this was removed, probably since YouTube was moving into the territory of renting films, and various companies didn’t want the WDTV to compete with their products. In short – it wasn’t a technological thing, but rather the stupidity of business and bureaucracy that removed this function.
If it was brought back, it would be great.
Quicktime-support and built-in viewing of trailers from Apple
While I on general principle loathe proprietary and closed formats, I still do enjoy watching trailers on Apples website. They look great, it’s easy to browse and overall it’s a nice experience. Much nicer than trying to find them on Youtube or whatever.
This is another fine example of how bureaucracy and business-decisions get in the way of technological progress. Apple owns Quicktime, and Apple of course doesn’t want anyone else to stick their fingers in the jar. They most assuredly do not want any type of competition with their own AppleTV-device, and thus lock this down really hard. WDC can’t add unofficial support either because Apple would come down on them with an army of lawyers.
Thus no gorgeous high-def Apple trailer on the WDTV Live. Which is a shame, because it would be awesome.
Better built-in file management functions
The WDTV Live has some rudimentary functions for basic file management. These can probably do in a pinch, but overall they’re pretty useless. Personally I always get annoyed at how you have to go into a certain submenu to do the file-management rather than being able to do it “on the fly” while you’re browsing through files.
The interface for this could be cleaned up, and ideally I feel that maybe buttons could be added to the remote for some of this.
This also brings me to…
Cleaned-up interface
The WDTV Live is very easy to navigate, and it’s obvious that the UI has it’s roots in the UI of it’s smaller, non-networked sibling. When networking and file-management was added these functions were simply bolted on, and in some cases this has made the otherwise quite sleek UI a bit unwieldy to navigate. Especially if you’re like me and have multiple network shares.
The user tends to spend quite a while navigating the primary menu, then navigating into the network share, then navigating a system of subfolders for organizing and then finally finding the file you wish to play back. I’m not sure how, but I do believe this could be cleaned up a bit.
Expanded functionality and customization for the Photo-function
When I first bought this device I felt that the functions for Photo-viewing weren’t going to get much use in my house. I was right about this, but recently I discovered that it’s actually a rather neat thing when you want to do a slideshow for friends. It’s much nicer relaxing in the couch than cramping together in front of the computer. You can sit there and click through the pictures and tell anecdotes about them.
However, the function is quite crude. First off it’s annoyingly slow when dealing with either large pictures. Changing from one 3 mpx picture to another 3 mpx picture takes up to ten seconds, and it’s frustrating not knowing if the thing is working or if you didn’t press down enough on the remote control. Maybe a “working” indicator would be nice? Or preferably somehow speeding up the process.
It would also be cool if you could customize things such as transitions a bit more. Maybe implement a system where the user could download a tool from WDC, create transitions and then upload them to his WDTV Live? And maybe share them online via some community? Who knows, lots of potential here.
Proper DVD-Playback
I (almost literally, as a I sold it for a paltry sum of money to a friend) abandoned my DVD-player shortly after buying the WDTV Live. DVDs fill very little function in my life these days, but occasionally I find a movie that isn’t available in any other format, or I go on a wild romp in my DVD-collection and find some golden oldie I want to view again. Most of the time I copy the DVD to an ISO-image and play it over a network share – or (and this works just fine too) I simply pop the disc in my DVD-drive and share it through SAMBA then play the movie straight from it over the network.
But the WDTV has some fairly psychotic playback of DVDs, which is annoying. It completely ignores nice DVD-functions such as menus and chapters, and instead utilizes the somewhat crude functions it already has to fast-forward/reverse.
So, it would be really nice if the WDTV when playing back DVD-material would emulate the DVD-experience, complete with menus, chapters and whatnot.
Ability to customize the UI a bit further
Often when using the WDTV Live I find myself wishing there was some function to change the background image of the main menu. Sure, it’s functional – but it would be nice to be able to put something else there without firing up the hex-editor and mucking about in the firmware-image. This could also be a part of that UI overhaul I mentioned earlier.
Not to mention the fact that I wish there were more customization of various settings. For example, you can jump ten minutes in a movie if you press the “next” button while fast-forwarding. This is nice, but often I wish there was a way to jump shorter distances. Often you overshoot where you want to be in the film, and then you tediously have to rewind back to that moment. It would be nice if the user could change the settings for things such as the jump-function.
And finally, at least for now, until I think of more things that might fit the bill…
Stable firmware
The latest firmware (as of writing this) is not particularly stable IMHO. It feels like a beta-release. The player will lock up in various artful ways – the play/pause buttons when viewing a film will stop working, or the “loading” indicator will show up while watching a movie, or the movies soundtrack will keep playing even after you’ve pressed “Stop” and have dropped into the navigation-menu.
This needs to be a higher priority. Unstable firmware does nothing to make customers happy, and we don’t like being treated as a big bunch of unpaid beta-testers. So, pretty please with sugar on top, spend time making the firmware more stable?
