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WD TV HD Media Player Hacked and Put to Good Use

By Alexander Grundner | August 4th, 2009 comments icon View Comments


WD TV HD Media Player

I’ve been hearing the quiet rumblings of people hacking their WD TV HD Media Player and making it do all sorts of wild things done typically with an HTPC. So, I decided to do some investigating. It turns out you can now add a USB Ethernet adapter for LAN connectivity to the device and flash it with the custom WDLXTV firmware and then load that with the OptWare package (originally created for the NSLU2-Linux platform) in order to install / enable SSH, FTP, UPnP, USB hub support, Samba, and other exciting features from its available catalog of ~1300 apps. Not bad for a roughly $99 product [Amazon].

Additional Resources:
WDTV WIKI – instructional resource on how to hack your WD TV HD Media Player.
WDTV FORUMS – a vibrant community of WD TV HD Media Player enthusiasts. Good tips on networking your device here.
MadHat.com – offers a comprehensive review of the WD TV HD Media Player including results of playing back a variety of HD video formats including MKV wrapped H.264 encoded video with AC3/DTS audio and Blu-ray .m2ts files. FYI, the device does support DVD movie .ISO playback (I’m guessing unencrypted).


Filed in: Streaming Media Devices  Tags: , , ,


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Alexander Grundner is the Editor & Publisher of eHomeUpgrade. He has been following "Digital Home" developments since 2003. You can catch his daily tech musings on Twitter: @agrundner.
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  • RoohBear
    You've got to love white-hat hackers :-) I guess when a bunch of engineers get laid off in a slow economy, they open up their toys and tinker. I'd love to see XBMC run on my little WDTV. I used to have an NSLU2 but it was so pathetically slow, that I gave it away.
  • andrewmclaughlin
    I still have a NLSU2 (aka the SLUG) that was really a pioneering device.
  • daskino
    yes been hacking my wdtv since day one, proplery the most capble player out there atm for the price. add a usb2ethernet and a usb hub and you are good to go for less than $120
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