Western Digital entered the digital media player market this week with the introduction of the new WD TV HD Media Player. The unit plays back digital media content stored on external USB drives directly onto an HDTV set. WD TV HD Media Player will work with most USB hard drives that can be recognized as a USB mass storage device (although Western Digital would like you to think that you should really couple it with the Passport drives).

The device plays back music, videos, and photos with support for the following file formats:

• Music – MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
• Photo – JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
• Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)

The player also supports 1080p playback of MPEG2/4, H.264, and WMV9 files at 24 fps; 1080i playback at 30fps, and 720p playback at 60fps. The built-in AAC/Dolby Digital decoder supports 2 channel output – if you want surround sound support, you’ll need to route the digital audio out to an A/V receiver or something that decodes multi-channel surround sound audio.

According to the product page, other features include:

Advanced navigation

• Thumbnail and list views – Browse content by filename or by thumbnails of photos, album covers and movie cover art.
• Media Library – Allows you to view all your media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives.View  content by categories such as genre, album, artist and date.
• Search – Search by genre, title, artist, filename and partial filename.

Photo viewing

• Create custom slide shows with a variety of transitions and background music
• Zoom and pan
• Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date

Movie viewing

• Fast forward, rewind, pause, zoom, and pan
• View subtitles
• Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date

Music playback

• Fast forward, rewind, pause, shuffle, repeat
• Search by filename, partial filename, most recently viewed and date

You can also connect and access two USB drives simultaneously.

Ports include HDMI, and composite outputs.

The suggested retail price for the WD TV HD Media Player is $129.99.

[Check it out via eHomeUpgrade]

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