After coming up with more and more connected players with the WD TV Live and Live Plus—both connect to the net, offering streaming media, while the WD TV Live Plus supports Netflix and other paid content—they toned it down a bit with the WD Elements Play, a drive-based media player that drops the price if you don’t mind losing the connectivity.
To some people that’s a good thing though; not everyone needs a media player that plays YouTube videos on their home entertainment systems, and even less people have a Netflix subscription after all. So what’s left? Pretty much what’s important: a built-in 1TB or 2TB drive to store multimedia content, and support for the most popular digital media formats.
And that’s pretty much it: load your media into the drive, plug it into a TV, grab the remote and sit back. The WD Elements Play supports AAC and MP3 audio, as well as a wide range of video format s, including RMVB, H.264 and MKV, among others.
No price or availability yet so we can’t know for sure exactly how “budget-friendly” this kit is going to be, but if it falls around what you’d pay for if you pick up the $150 WD TV Live, then it’s all good. We expect it to be a bit more expensive though, since this kit does come with its own drive.
Tags: Multimedia Players, Set Top Kits, Western Digital
