To describe this little box as mini is something of an understatement.  It's not going too far to say you can hold the whole thing in one hand.  

Despite its small size, it's clear that a lot of effort has gone into the case, with a robust plastic case giving a serious feel to the WD TV.  Western Digital seems to have succumbed to the trend for glossy surfaces, which looks great--until they get covered in dust and greasy fingerprints, at which point it's rather less attractive.

The front panel has neither or a screen nor any controls, which has two practical results: the first is that you can't listen to music without first turning on your TV to navigate through the content, and the second is that you're pretty stuck if the remote control runs out of battery power.

The remote itself is very slim and just ten centimeters long.  It contains only the bare minimum of buttons: four directional arrows, an on/off switch and a play/pause control.  In its efforts to streamline the remote, though, Western Digital has rather foolishly neglected to include a volume control, which means you'll need the main remote for your TV or speakers to turn the sound up and down.

The WD TV's real strength is its interface, though.  It's fast, responsive and well-designed, and bears a certain similarity to the one found in Windows Media Center.  The menu system is based around four options, with one each for photos, videos and music, with a fourth giving access to different settings.

When navigating through your content, you can choose to show folders as either icons or in list view.  If you go for the former, then the WD TV displays thumbnails of all your photos, previews of your videos, and, where available, the album cover art for your music.

There are a lot of ways into the file system, too: you can sort files by date or by artist, music by genre or search for keywords.


Compatibility

Although Western Digital has designed its own interface, the hard work is done by the excellent Sigma Designs EM8635 chip, which has already proved itself on the Dvico Tvix HD 6500 and the PopcornHour A-110.

However, we're forced to admit that the WD TV gets less out of the firmware than some of its competitors do.  Take the example of files with the *.DIVX extension: it refuses to read them, even though it supports the DivX format and is perfectly happy with DivX content in AVI and MKV containers.  

Another weakness is the handling of files with more than one audio channel, where support is limited to AC3 and MP3 tacks in MKV files.  With AVI and WMA content, we couldn't displace the default audio track.

If you're stuck with the wrong audio track on a movie you're desperate to see, the WD TV won't really be able to help you out with subtitles, either, where it can only read SRT files.

In short, the hardware can handle MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX 6, XviD, ASP and AVC), WMV and H.264 video.  HD support comes in the form of DivX HD, MPEG-4 AVC HD and WMV HD.  AVI, MP4, MKV and WMV are acceptable container formats.  When it comes to audio, you can choose between MP3, WMA, OGG and Dolby Digital files.  Photos need to be in the JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF or PNG format.  As we mentioned above, only SRT subtitle files work, which are limited to two lines of forty characters each.

Connectivity

There aren't very many audio and video outputs, with just one composite video connection for SD televisions, a HDMI port for HD TVs, and a 5.1 optical audio port for sound.  There are two USB hosts, one at the back and one of the side, both of which can be connected to external hard drives or flash memory sticks.  A composite video cable is include, but not a HDMI cable.