WDTV2 LIVE Vs Cinetube – A Side By Side Comparison
Buying a media player has become all the rage nowadays. End users are spoiled for choice with the large number and variety of media players available from various manufacturers. The WDTV 2 Live and Cinetube are two standout media players. Today they have taken the dynamic electronics market by storm.
The WDTV 2 Live player from Western Digital is a 1080p Full-HD (high definition) network media player. You can stream movies and also connect your HDTV to Internet video. In addition to these features, enjoy unlimited access to online movies with Netflix unlimited membership that comes with 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 comes with the extremely popular and high-end features ‘DVD Navigation’ and ‘Windows 7’s Play To support’. Access to your favorite photos, music and movies is no longer limited to a small computer screen. You can play any media not only from the Internet but also from your own home network using WD TV Live firmware. It’s easy to use, easy to understand and browsing torrent content is a breeze. The WD TV Live firmware is also extremely stable. This network media player lets you listen and view all your audio and video media files on your TV in Full-HD 1080p. All this 5 x 4 x 1.5-inch WDTV 2 Live box needs are a few more customization options for end-users and minor UI (user interface fixes), like moving the ‘Netflix’ option to Internet Media in instead of the ‘Video’ option where you currently are.
Supported file formats include:
Video: AVI, MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV, TS/TP/M2T, M2TS, WMV9, etc.
Image: 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
The most recent offering from Brite-View is the Realtek based Cinetube 1920X1080HD (1080p) HD (high definition) media player. It has a 3 in 1 function of a streamer, a torrent downloader along with being an HD media player. Its built-in bittorrent engine allows both direct download of media files from the Internet and sharing to display them on TV instead of regular PC. Users can enjoy high-quality streaming from Netflix, CNN, and ESPN, as third-party apps like TVersity and PlayOn can also be installed on Cinetube. The Cinetube also has built-in support for UPnP and Flickr. The last function allows you to search for photos on the Internet and display them on your TV. Another feature is the built-in YouTube for TV or YouTube XL.
Cinetube media player is compatible with MacOS HFS+ format file systems. It’s compatible with:
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 you to navigate the DVD menu and view your videos just like you would a regular DVD. It also plays multimedia files on computers connected to the same network or 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 it is definitely a plus. It has better user interface, audio and video output as compared to Cinetube media player. Unlike Realtek updates, users do not need to wait for firmware updates from WD. The price difference between two players is much less and between the two, the WD 2 Live offers you better value for money.