Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center

Western Digital WD TV Live Hub 1 TB Media Center
The WD TV Live Hub comes well packaged, the manual is to be seen from their website, it only comes with quick setup, which is ok, since it's the trend most products these days. 

Installation is very easy. Plug in the hard disk to network and power. My house setup is that, I use power line network extenders to obtain wired ethernet connection down to near my TV, from which I have put in a switch, to give me two wired network connections. One goes to PS3, and one goes to this new Media Hub. Connected the Hub to the TV via my Onkyo Receiver via HDMI connection. 

I also use the Harmony One universal remote, the device to be used in that to hook up to this Media Hub is Media Center PC. You can then setup an activity on the Harmony universal remote to use this Media Hub. 

Now if you turn on this media hub and see on TV, you will notice this not just an ordinary 1 TB hard disk, it has an Operating System of it's own, called "Mochi". If there is a firmware upgrade required, you will see the firmware tab selected when you turn on the hub. You may choose to upgrade, which is a download and install. There are facilities to browse Photos, Videos, Music, as well as various Apps in a tab called "Services". Examples of apps are already listed in product description here, but let me tell you the ones I use. Netflix, Pandora, Accuweather and Facebook. They all work seamlessly. 

The Mochi OS supports multi-tasking. So you can say be playing a station on Pandora, and come out and browse Photos. Apps also remember their state when you left them. Pretty neat OS. 

The remote that comes with it is solid and works as should be. I have noticed sometimes a bit of a lag in when I request an action and the Hub to respond, but pretty sure they will fix all that with firmware upgrades. I have seen regular upgrades by Western Digital, and none has broken anything, only enhanced features. 

Now as hard disk. There is a simple software to download onto your PC from their website, called WD Discovery. Run that software, it automatically finds out the Hub on your network and lets you add it to your system as a Mapped Network Drive. After that it's just drag and drop, and direct access like any normal hard disk. It was really simple. So now I can drag and drop music and photos and see on my TV. 

The video and audio quality being passed into my receiver was excellent, on Netflix, I can see 1080p movies streaming without any problems. The device has never crashed. It looks good too, it's black and sleek, and a nice white light with WD logo lights up on front, when being used as a Media Center. The User Interface is good looking, intuitive and customizable to a certain degree. 

It also has a USB port on the front to hook up external USB drives, or devices which can be accessed as USB media devices.