Admittedly, they're somewhat different devices, but have overlapping functionality. The Apple TV works wirelessly and connects to your Mac and a widescreen TV. The WD TV Media Player connects to a user’s TV or home theater and plays digital movies, music and photos from WD’s My Passport portable drive or other USB mass storage device.
If you don't want to bother configuring a wireless network or implementing a wired network, then the WD TV Media Player is certainly worth considering since it allows you to access your high-definition content on the biggest screen in the home. But if you already have a wireless network set up (using an AirPort Base Station, Time Capsule or other device), the Apple TV is your better bet. Especially since it allows you to access movies via the iTunes Store.
To use the WD TV HD Media Player, you leave it connected to your TV, and simply plug in up to two My Passport USB drives -- which I love by the way -- or other USB mass storage devices (any of which you'll have to purchase separately) loaded with HD media. Using the included remote control, you can navigate and play your content with the media player’s high-definition on-screen menu. With My Passport drives now available in 500GB capacities, users can build large collections on multiple drives, all playable by WD TV.
Navigating content on USB drives is fast and easy with WD TV HD Media Player’s remote control and on-screen menu; the interface is very Mac-like. Content can be viewed either by file name or thumbnails of photos, album covers or movie cover art. In addition, automatic media aggregation lets the viewer see all their media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives.
Of course, this means yet another remote control to clutter up your living room when most of us have too many anyway. And the WD TV HD Media Player isn't compatible (yet, at least) with the Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes, which I use.
If you choose to do with the WD device, you'll find support for a plethora of formats: MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA, JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG, MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264), PLS, M3U and WPL. However, the device doesn't support protected premium content such as movies or music from the iTunes Store, Cinema Now, Movielink, Amazon Unbox and Vongo.
The WD TV HD Media Player supports FAT32, NTFS and HFS+ hard drive formats. However, an external hard drive formatted as HFS+ connected to a WD TV HD Media Player must have journaling disabled before the player will be able to read the data on the drive. If you have a "journaled" hard drive, you'll have to use the Disk Utility application to disable journaling. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is designed for a partition that you want to serve as a boot (start-up) volume. Select Mac OS Extended (No Journaling) is for volumes that will be used as media or data storage drives.
The Western Digital device does what it's designed to do well. However, I just can't see enough of an advantage that it offers over an Apple TV to recommend it wholeheartedly unless you simply don't want to deal with the occasional headache establishing and maintaining a network can entail.
Macsimum rating: 6 out of 10