-
Western Digital Media Player
Slightly OT, but might be of useful info to everyone.
I do quite a bit of Trade show videos for my clients. Just for the heck of it, I bought one of these new Western Digital Media Player boxes ($100) Just plug-in pretty much anything USB; flash drive, HD, or even a fast Compact Flash card, and you get HDMI out in most HD formats to a LCD or Plasma monitor.
This thing is crazy easy, and a dream for a trade show, office lobby or in-store displays. No moving parts like DVD, so it can run 24/7. You have to experiment with file formats/audio formats to see what works best. H.264 with AAC audio seems to look best to me. (WMV-HD looked so-so) I did find about a 2-3 frame delay with audio (might depend on monitor) but, that can be easily adjusted by testing before compressing your video.
Anyway, this a great tool to recommend to clients who want to display a video for presentation. (And yes, it does loop automatically a single file or all files)
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
11 Replies
-
I was reading about these recently.
nice little box for cost and what it does.
-
Yes, it is an amazing little unit. I use it for trade shows and also store my HD demos to screen for clients. I have had the best luck with m2t files. I cannot seem to get h.264 to work. I get video but no audio.
Try downloading one of the Quicktime movie trailers and see if you get audio.
Interestingly enough, it plays my native XDCAM-EX files, but, again no audio. I have been told that it will also play native HDV. -
I found that AAC audio files work fine. If you output from FCP, using Quicktime Conversion, change the audio from Linear PCM to AAC. Works like a champ.
But, I found that Telestream Episode seems compress cleaner on the video using their program.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Hmmm….I am using AAC 44.1 khz.
-
That’s weird? I spend at day yesterday messing with settings and ACC worked for me. Try 48K instead of 44K. That’s what I was using.
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Did I miss something or the unit can’t play any of “european” frame rates of 25p or 50i ?
-
Can this WD media player play a QT movie exported from FCP 5? What about a movie extracted from a DVD (I use DVDxDV)? I’m wanting to bypass playing from the DVD as some DVDs get stuck halfways, and hope this media player will solve half my problems 🙂
-
Yes, you play a file from FCP5. You need to export out of FCP as an H.264 file. Works perfectly. I don’t know about DVDxDV. Here’s a link to the WD website. They have info on what formats the Media Player will play.
https://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=572
Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
You’ll want to look at the specs, but we play back H.264 files on it and it works great.
-Russ
Russell Lasson
Universal Post
Ridgeline Digital Cinema Mastering
Salt Lake City, UT -
I am new to WD Media drives and setting up some for use at a trade show. Auto set up and looping were very easy.
Whenever the video files loop the following type message appears on the screen for a couple of seconds:
“1/1:Audio channel ACC.”Any idea how to eliminate this message from appearing? We are using MP4 files we created in Final Cut.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up