I thought I’d wait a week or so before I wrote my review for the WD HD TV player.

First things first, it’s small and sleek. Next to my 22″ Samsung TV, it still looks tiny. I was expecting it to be around the size of the WD MyBook but it’s quite a bit smaller. That’s saying something for such a well kitted out device.

As all the specs say, HDMI out, Digital out, component out, 2x USB support

The device is as simple as:

• copy your files to a USB stick (make sure it’s formatted as FAT32)
• plug it into your WD TV HD
• WD TV HD will look on the newly inserted drive for content
• Play

Moving through film/tv show is simple, but I would recommend getting a fast access USB stick or HDD as when fast-forwarding through a large chunk of video the WD player can take a while to sync up again.
The only obvious thing missing from the product is ethernet support. I’m hoping to correct this next week when I pruchase a USB-Ethernet adaptor. Once I’ve attached it I’ll report back.

OK so that’s all the usual buisness sorted what I’m more interested in seeing is how the modded firmware from B-RAD can extend the WD TV HD player. At the moment I’m not getting the full use out of the kit so I’m going to buy the prementioned USB-Ethernet adaptor and a USB hub to extend it to a torrent box and FTP server.

Side-note: Another reason for buying this was to reduce my power usage. turning on my PC everytime I wanted to watch a movie is a pain in the butt. However no where in the specs mention power usage. So from experience the power usage figures are unsurprisingly good, with a USB HDD plugged into this docking station it uses around 20W 7W when playing a video. Not bad coming down from my PC which uses about 200W when watching TV shows and movies..

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I’ve now purchased these two little add-ons for the box from Amazon:

NEWLinkUSB ethernet adaptor and the Akasa USB 2.0 HUB +Card reader (I plan to buy a nice chunky compact flash card to keep everything on at a later date)

It’s now slowly turning into a NAS box and web server. Luckly I’ve had B-RAD’s guides to follow.

Following the instructions is all quite easy. Lightthp server + PHP and it’s all running. I’m planning to install Ruby 1.9 and Rails when everything else is up and running and hopefully the little box should take the load!

In short IPKG once you get used to how it works, is great. The learning curb is quite small. After an evening of hacking around following the guide and adding in extra things like OpenSSH it’s all running happily. Now to get the Windows box to be able to see the usb drives and external HDD!