A new way for us to play and view our created HD content!

I've been watching the progress of hardware media players that connect to our HD TV sets for the appearance of some that support HD WMV files and other HD video formats. Up until now several players have been available but none actually supported high definition video.

We'll see many configurations but I wanted the simplest possible, something that would let me use my own USB external hard drive(s) and USB thumb drives. And that is just what Western Digital has brought out. Quietly introduced a few months ago, some of the retail outlets don't even realize they have them; Best Buy told me that they had nothing like that yet, but when I told them their web site said they had them in stock and they looked it up they had 5 on hand.

Two minutes later they had four (Took me that long to get checked out).

I hooked it up to my TV with an HDMI cable I had on hand, powered it and the TV up, plugged in a 4GB thumb drive to one of the two USB ports and in seconds was watching a 26 minute 1280x720p WMV file in clear, clean, crisp HD on my 42" LCD TV.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=572

I don't have a Blu-ray player, for now don't plan on buying a Blu-ray burner nor pay the price for BD media. I think Sony has blundered by keeping the price too high, Sony is disappointed in the sluggish market reaction in that folks have not purchased Blu-ray players in the numbers they had hoped and I think there is a very real chance that electronic distribution of HD content may overtake the optical disk marketing in the long run. I think we'll see more movies sold by download and on flash media.

And this WD media player may be a step in that direction. At least for me it is a way for me to show/view my produced content in my home.