WDTV Live Stream vs Live Hub

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Dear WD Community,

My current setup is wdtv live hube and external 1TB hard drive, I’m thinking to upgrade the hard drive for larger size but my hub is getting old and i need your help to decide if I sold the hub and got the new device Live stream and add a 3TB hard drive, is it better or keep the live hub and upgrade only the hard drive.

Is the new device hardware and performance better, same or less than the hub.

thanks in advance. 

2

I only have the Hub. If the only problem you have with the Hub is the size of the hard disk, I would just buy another external hard disk to use with it. As long as you are using one of the latest firmwares I think you can use up to a 3 TB external disk.

I don’t have the Streaming, but I think the main differences are it has no internal hard disk, it has built-in wireless networking, it has some extra online services included, it is cheaper than the Hub and it is smaller. If I were buying a new unit I would buy a Streaming rather than a Hub. If you buy a 3 TB external disk you can use it with the Hub. If you’re not happy you can always buy the Streaming later. Either way the 3 TB disk won’t be wasted. Just my opinion.

3

Thanks for your reply, actually my idea is, after almost one year using the hub i know the hardware is not the same and thinking of new hard drive make me think to sell my hub and got a new dvice, this is why i think about the streaming.

My main question to whome used both devices, I want to know about the device performance, which one is better performance and hardware specs?

Thanks 

4

I own a Hub and set up and used the new Stream for a relative and the Hub’s performance is much higher. When it was freshly installed, the first level of menu interaction on the Stream felt a little quicker but that was over very quickly. The performance after getting everything fully set up and the media library finished compiling, I’d say the Hub has the upper hand by a small margin. Specs wise, the Hub will always be technologically superior because the point of the Hub was to be able to handle multiple (3+) streams of full HD, totally maxed audio and video quality, hence the name Hub. It was supposed to be the central hub that you would connect to other WD units like the old Live and Stream over a network and they would stream a processed line of data from the Hub.

So in short, hardware on the Hub is wayyy better and faster than the Stream, and when you’re dealing with a media library with all the movie thumbnails or info pages or anything like that, the Hub’s got the upper hand. The Stream’s main purpose is to be a receiver for the stuff that is transcoded and streamed from the Hub. Don’t replace the internal drive because I’ve heard of that causing problems (in fact I’ve never heard of it working properly before because of software limitations) but you can get multiple external hard drives up to 3 terabytes each and add them to your media library on the Hub to make it easier to access from a consolidated source/folder on the Hub.