www.NewVentures.ca

So I got a neat little gadget from my daughter and her partner a while back – it’s called a WDTV or (Western Digital TeleVision) and I have to tell you – it’s pretty cool!

I’ve been using it pretty extensively now for I think almost a year and it has worked flawlessly. What’s it do? Here’s a short list:

• Plays any type of media content you can think of – Video, Stills and Audio
• Connects to either a regular TV (red, white, yellow) or a HDTV at 1080p ( red, white, green, blue, red or HDMI )
• Connects to two USB  powered external drives at the same time or two USB memory sticks
• Is heavily supported by Western Digital, with numerous easy upgrades
• Can be converted, with a bit of work, to a Linux media player using one of the external hard drives
• Can use play lists for both audio and video files
• Can play videos/audio/pictures by either folder, genre, random or author
• Is supported by a huge on-line community/forum

This little box – and it is VERY little, approximately 3 inches by 5 inches by 2 inches in diameter, is  very impressive and I’ve converted a lot of my CD’s to MP3 just so I can access them whenever I want to. Instead of going to my wall cabinet and pulling out CD’s that I want to listen to, I just look them up on my WDTV, plus I can mix and match as I choose.

I’ve also ripped a lot of the kids movies and put them onto the hard drive, it makes life a lot easier when you try to entice two very fickle grandsons who quickly decide they don’t want to watch one movie but rather another, having them all at ones finger tips makes the whole process quite painless…

My only small complaint I might have, is on the rewind of my movies that I’ve put on the hard drive for easy access. The rewind doesn’t update the rewound picture at a sufficient enough rate to decide how far back one has gone, so sometimes I rewind too far, and other times not far enough, it’s a real “trial and error” process which is a bit of a pain, but one I’m willing to put up with in order to use all the other great benefits!

Another really neat feature I discovered is that after selecting what music I want to listen to, I can go back to the main menu and put on a slide show of my favorite pictures that I’ve also saved (these can even be on the same external hard drive if you choose) which can lead to wonderful energy throughout the house.

Although I have to warn you, if you use pictures of your grandkids you can spend hours in front of the TV just oohing and ahhhing over their “younger” pictures…. one tends to fall into a time warp when looking at grandkid pictures…. so be warned!    😉