Page 3: TV Live Hub, Inside The Hub
TV Live Hub
The Western Digital TV Live Hub is a fairly small black box. It is a little bigger than a CD case in size, but it should fit in anyone's TV or entertainment center area. Since the color is black, it should match the other devices.
The back of the TV Live Hub has the various connections for inputs and outputs. From the left, the AC adapter port, optical audio, HDMI, USB, Ethernet, composite, and component. Unlike the TV Live Plus, this box is big enough to put the connections directly on the back instead of using a breakout cable. Unfortunately, there are no included AV cables to hook up to your TV. Make sure you take that into consideration.
The front of the Hub has the power button on the left and another USB port on the right. The unit is never "off" since it acts as a network storage server and UPnP AV streaming servers all the time. What the button does is turn on the display. Since this is an embedded player, it won't take up much power as it uses some type of ARM CPU.
The bottom of the Hub has a single fan to cool the 1TB laptop sized hard drive as well as some labeling and holes for wall mounting. Remember, if you do wall mount the TV Live Hub, the remote uses IR. It must have a line of sight with the front of the Hub or it won't work. There is a reset button to the left in this picture.
Inside The Hub
While we didn't open the WD TV Live Plus, we felt it was important to see what was powering the Hub. There are no screws holding the faces of the sides. Instead, the top locks in using plastic clips (the ones that will break if you aren't careful). If you push on the back and up at the same time, one of the clips should spring out of place to give you access to remove the remaining with some gentle coaxing.
What we have here is a small computer complete with a 1TB Scorpio Blue hard drive. There is a gigabit ethernet provided by a standard Realtek chip (RTL8110SC) along with 4x 512Mb (64MB) Nanya RAM modules (NT5TU64M16DG-AC) and a Sigma SMP8654AD-CBE3 running at 500MHz.
The SMP8654 is defined as a Secure Media Processor since it can handle DRM encumbered formats which we don't support at all. The SMP8654 also doesn't natively support gigabit, so the Realtek chip is added on the PCI bus (the only expansion bus). Since PCI runs at 33MB/s, you won't get true gigabit speeds, but it is better than nothing.
The Western Digital TV Live Hub is a fairly small black box. It is a little bigger than a CD case in size, but it should fit in anyone's TV or entertainment center area. Since the color is black, it should match the other devices.
The back of the TV Live Hub has the various connections for inputs and outputs. From the left, the AC adapter port, optical audio, HDMI, USB, Ethernet, composite, and component. Unlike the TV Live Plus, this box is big enough to put the connections directly on the back instead of using a breakout cable. Unfortunately, there are no included AV cables to hook up to your TV. Make sure you take that into consideration.
The front of the Hub has the power button on the left and another USB port on the right. The unit is never "off" since it acts as a network storage server and UPnP AV streaming servers all the time. What the button does is turn on the display. Since this is an embedded player, it won't take up much power as it uses some type of ARM CPU.
The bottom of the Hub has a single fan to cool the 1TB laptop sized hard drive as well as some labeling and holes for wall mounting. Remember, if you do wall mount the TV Live Hub, the remote uses IR. It must have a line of sight with the front of the Hub or it won't work. There is a reset button to the left in this picture.
Inside The Hub
While we didn't open the WD TV Live Plus, we felt it was important to see what was powering the Hub. There are no screws holding the faces of the sides. Instead, the top locks in using plastic clips (the ones that will break if you aren't careful). If you push on the back and up at the same time, one of the clips should spring out of place to give you access to remove the remaining with some gentle coaxing.
What we have here is a small computer complete with a 1TB Scorpio Blue hard drive. There is a gigabit ethernet provided by a standard Realtek chip (RTL8110SC) along with 4x 512Mb (64MB) Nanya RAM modules (NT5TU64M16DG-AC) and a Sigma SMP8654AD-CBE3 running at 500MHz.
The SMP8654 is defined as a Secure Media Processor since it can handle DRM encumbered formats which we don't support at all. The SMP8654 also doesn't natively support gigabit, so the Realtek chip is added on the PCI bus (the only expansion bus). Since PCI runs at 33MB/s, you won't get true gigabit speeds, but it is better than nothing.