Buying a media player has become all the rage nowadays. End users are spoiled for choice with the large number and variety of media players available from various manufacturers. The WDTV 2 Live and the Cinetube are two media players that stand out. They have now taken the dynamic electronics market by storm.
Western Digital’s WDTV 2 Live Player is a 1080p Full-HD (high-definition) network media player. You can stream movies and also connect your HDTV to Internet video. In addition to these features, enjoy unlimited access to online movies with the unlimited Netflix membership that comes with the WDTV 2 Live Plus media player along with other premium web content. However, Hulu, Amazon Videos on Demand, CinemaNow, and other similar services are not supported.
The WDTV 2 Live media player also comes with the extremely popular and high-end features ‘DVD Navigation’ and ‘Windows 7’s Play To support’. Access to your favorite photos, music and movies is no longer limited to a small computer screen. You can play any media not only from the Internet but also from your own home network using the WD TV Live firmware. It’s easy to use, easy to understand and browsing torrent content is a breeze. The WD TV Live firmware is also extremely stable. This network media player allows you to listen and view all your audio and video media files on your TV in Full-HD 1080p. All this 5 x 4 x 1.5 inch WDTV 2 Live box needs is a few more customization options for end users and minor UI (user interface fixes) such as moving the ‘Netflix’ option to Internet Media on place the ‘Video’ option where it currently is.
Supported file formats include:
Video: AVI, MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV, TS/TP/M2T, M2TS, WMV9, etc.
Image: JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG.
Audio: MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS.
Playlist: PLS, M3U, WPL and Subtitle: SRT, ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI
Brite-View’s newest offering is the Realtek-based Cinetube 1920X1080HD (1080p) HD (high definition) media player. It has a 3-in-1 function of a streamer, a torrent downloader as well as being an HD media player. Its built-in bittorrent engine allows both direct downloading of media files from the Internet and sharing to display them on TV instead of regular PC. Users can enjoy high-quality streaming of Netflix, CNN and ESPN as third-party apps like TVersity and PlayOn can also be installed on Cinetube. The Cinetube also has built-in support for UPnP and Flickr. The latest feature allows you to search for photos on the Internet and display them on your TV. Another feature is the integrated YouTube for TV or YouTube XL function.
Cinetube media player supports MacOS HFS+ format file systems. It’s compatible with:
Multiple video formats in VCD, SVCD, MPEG1, MPEG2, M2TS, MPEG4, H.264/AVC, DivX, Xvid, VC-1, FLV, Real Video, and multiple audio formats including DTS and Dolby Digital. It is also compatible with ISO files. This feature allows you to navigate the DVD menu and watch your videos as you would a normal DVD. It also plays multimedia files on computers connected to the same network or stored on USB storage devices (in NTFS, EXT-3, FAT and HFS+).
The WDTV 2 Live media player is from a well-known manufacturer and the Netflix account that comes with it is definitely a plus. It has better user interface, audio and video output compared to Cinetube media player. Unlike Realtek updates, users do not need to wait for WD firmware updates. The price difference between the two players is much less and between the two, the WD 2 Live offers you better value for money.
