Western Digital's "WD TV" high-def media player has been well received due to its appeal as a low-cost, TV-attached player of almost any format thrown at it. Trouble is, the current incarnation requires an attached USB hard drive as its source of material.
Fortunately for those who prefer to network their media library, Western Digital appears to be prepping a successor known as the "WD TV Live". The second-gen model, pictured below, has cropped up at AVSforum.com and adds network media support to its list of features.
Western Digital has yet to confirm such a device exists, but the images look real enough and there's no missing the all-important Ethernet port at the back of the device.
Like the original WD TV, it'll support a wide array of audio/video formats, but it'll be adding DTS to the mix, too. According to the leaked specification, the WD TV Live will support all the following file formats:
Video: AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1),
TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1) MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9
Image: JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG
Audio: MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS
Playlist: PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitle: SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI
There's no indication of pricing or availability yet, but the first-gen WD TV is available today priced at around £70. How much the addition of network media streaming and DTS decoding adds to that figure remains to be seen.
