WDTV2 LIVE Vs Cinetube – A Side by Side Comparison
Buying a media player has become a rage today. End-users are spoilt for choice with the large number and variety of media players available through various manufacturers. The WDTV 2 Live and the Cinetube are two media players that stand out. They’ve currently taken the dynamic marketplace of electronics by storm.
The WDTV 2 Live player from the manufacturer Western Digital is a Full-HD (High definition) 1080p network media player. You can stream movies and also connect your HDTV to Internet video. Apart from these features, you enjoy unlimited access to online cinema 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 has the extremely popular and high-end ‘DVD Navigation’ and ‘Windows 7’s Play To support’ features. Access to your favorite photos, music and movies is no longer confined to a small computer screen. You can play any media not only from the Internet but also from your very own home network using the WD TV Live firmware. It is user-friendly, easy to understand and navigating torrent content is a breeze. The WD TV Live firmware is also extremely stable. This network media player allows you to hear and see all your audio and video media files on your TV in full-HD 1080p. All that this 5 x 4 x 1.5-inches WDTV 2 Live box needs are a few more customization options for the end users and minor UI (user interface corrections) like moving the ‘Netflix’ option to Internet Media instead of the ‘Video’ option where it’s currently located.
The supported file formats include:
Video: AVI, MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV, TS/TP/M2T, M2TS, WMV9, etc.
Photo: 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 latest offering is the Realtek-based Cinetube 1920X1080HD (1080p) HD (High-Definition) media player. It has a 3-in-1 function of a streamer, torrent downloader apart from being a HD media player. Its built-in bittorrent engine allows both direct downloads of media files from the Internet and sharing for display on the TV instead of the usual PC. Users can enjoy high quality streaming from Netflix, CNN and ESPN as third party applications like TVersity and PlayOn can also be installed on the Cinetube. The Cinetube also has built-in UPnP support and Flickr. The latter feature allows you to browse the Internet for photos and display them on your TV. Another feature is the embedded YouTube for TV or YouTube XL feature.
The Cinetube media player supports MacOS HFS+ formatted file systems. It supports:
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 also supports ISO files. This feature allows so you to navigate the DVD menu and watch your videos like you would with a regular DVD. It also plays media files on computers connected to the same network or those 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 is a definite plus. It has a better UI, audio and video output when compared with the Cinetube media player. Unlike Realtek upgrades, users needn’t wait for WD firmware upgrades. The price difference between two players is very less and between the two the WD 2 Live gives you better value for your money.