Western Digital WD TV Live Hub review

We’re big fans of Western Digital’s media players. The WD TV and WD TV Live have both won awards from us for their diminutive designs, slick interfaces and wide format support. With little reason to mess with a great product, Western Digital has instead created something a little bit different, the WD TV Live Hub.

This sleek slice of consumer technology is certainly designed for living room use. Like its predecessors, you can stream media files to it across a wired network from a PC, laptop or NAS. However, the Live Hub also contains a 1TB hard disk, so you can store files locally; plus it acts a media server, so you can share those files to other devices on your network.

We plugged in the Live Hub and it set itself up with no problems, automatically detecting our TVs resolution, setting up a network connection and alerting us to a new firmware update. The only thing we had to do was change the time zone to UK time.

It then scanned the USB hard disk we had plugged in for media files, and asked if we’d like to sync the files with the internal drive – you can select either all files or supported files only. You can also choose to sync files with a Windows shared folder over the network connection, and thanks to a Gigabit Ethernet port, this won’t take forever. Alongside that port are HDMI, component, composite and optical S/PDIF outputs. There are two USB ports, one front and one rear, for connecting external storage devices.

There’s something terribly seductive about the Live Hub, the menu system (called Mochi) is colourful and easy to navigate, with a stylish font and simple animated icons. The device itself is a brilliant piece of minimalist design, and yes, you can turn of the illuminated Western Digital logo on the fascia if you want.